We Hear Your Cries
By Brenda Shoss
An Animal Rights Poem from All-Creatures.org

All of God's creatures have rights, a fact that most people don't seem to recognize. This includes both human and non-human animals, but not all of them can speak for themselves.

We Hear Your Cries
By Brenda Shoss, Kinship Circle

WE HEAR YOUR CRIES
Inside lightless stockades where metal bars define your earth
Where your frantic eyes gaze over an amputated beak
Unable to dust bath or flutter one wing
An automated hum, the only sound in your artificial prison

WE HEAR YOUR CRIES
In crates that contain you from endless pregnancy to nameless death
From your first and last walk down death's corridor
Toward a blood-splattered man who guides your quivering body
into the blast of his stun gun...
From the impersonal thrust of his knife through still-warm flesh
to the final moment when you are dismantled limb by limb

WE HEAR YOUR CRIES
As you rock in the corner of your concrete world
Waiting for them to blind, burn and poison your exhausted body
We ache to shield you from the scalpels, skull probes, tubes and knives
that remove your life in pieces...
Until your broken body concedes. A soundless death without purpose.

WE HEAR YOUR CRIES
When they blast 5,000 volts of electrified pain into your flesh
Every time they batter you with metal pipes, bullhooks, flank straps and
spurs — to obliterate your memories of a mother's love and infinite green

WE HEAR YOUR CRIES
As you search for one familiar face in the desolate days
before a gas chamber claims your anonymous life
When you seek the comfort of one set of arms
Your last tail wagged
Your last purr heard in a gray room with no windows

WE HEAR YOUR CRIES AND WE ARE COMING.


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