From All-Creatures.org

Animal Rights Poetry By Noël Sweeney

The Octopus Met Sisyphus

Though few clung to the sharp deal
Not knowing which one was unreal
As white is black and black is white
Faded in a freezing pettifog night
Out of mind as well as out of sight
Deaf to their cries beneath the waves
Their home became a watery trave
Eight arms bobbing as a lifeless cork
Once as alive as a harpooned orca
The crooked compass for the octopus
Pointing from east unto the West by us
Her corpus plight dark yet so luminous
Fish of every kind the wide ocean binds
Closed eyes that opened our minds
To the sight we are compelled to see
Mile on watery mile of a sad cemetery
Seeing a diseased sea of animal misery

The sailors sing a shanty lullaby
While a whole world fiddles faster
Than a looming out of tune Nero
Witnessing our blooming disaster
Spies the last octopus at minus zero
When her three hearts that remain
Are broken in time all the same

All that is left from the total sum
Is our theft in an ocean of scum
As the Chinese schooners circled
Then they hacked her eight arms off
A void on the ocean’s telling schroff
The mountain sunk in a seasick scrum
Hidden by the drunken sailors’ rum
The throttle of so many empty bottles
Mean we can only see a plastic sea
While we stumble mumble and gurgle
All the ocean’s occupants are burgled
All we can see through bloodshot sighs
All we can see is our dross demolition
When the waves drown we can protest
Then sound off for a senseless abolition
As if it was by some oceanic revolution
Rather than death a calculated destitution

Forever rolling towards our pus
Minus outweighs a plus for us
Caught by the tentacles of truth
When we ask ‘where is the body’
Then try to deny our focused eye
Faint-hearted and pusillanimous
When there is no habeas corpus
Reneged on our promise to protect
Now the octopus has met Sisyphus

© Noel Sweeney, 2023

 

Go on to: Time-bomb Heart
Return to: Poetry by Noël Sweeney
Read more at Animal Rights Poetry