Albatross combines the hard-hitting triad of animal rights poetry in An Animal's Charter and Blue-bird sings the Blues and Jungle Judge Justice within a single volume.
Together the anvil striking poems and tough calling-down prose encapsulate the practice and use in all aspects of our animal abuse. The subjects run the gamut suffered by our subjects from abattoirs to zoos, from trophy hunting to killing kangaroos and from fast fading mist gorillas to the appearance of serial killers.
Albatross shows the ones who fall at our feet as well as those we choose to wear and eat. The poetry of our legal animal slavery is compared to how we have treated others who are vulnerable too in the graphic connection between racism and sexism and speciesism. In doing so we see the pale imitation of camouflaged cruelty in the pursuit of our conspiratorial truth towards injustice.
Human rights are beyond price because with them we can live and die with dignity. Animal rights are denied by us yet they are essential for the selfsame reason. Animals must be members of rather than numbers in our society where they are mere statistics of misery. Their fate and fortune and future in our scheme is the broken-winged theme of Albatross.
Review of the work:
They are very powerful poems: Animal Equality
The undercover agents are deeply moved by the poems: Mercy for Animals
It's wonderful to see the intersectionality you're exploring between societal issues and our environment: Claire L
No«l Sweeney certainly knows his stuff. You can tell he is passionate about the subject: Les S
These are very touching and beautiful poems: Animal Justice
Your poems are powerful and evocative works of art: Megan S
Your beautiful and powerful poem: 'A Whale of a Time': Tiffany
As these poems span all aspects of our animal abuse they are positively not for the pusillanimous. The poetry ranges across air and land and sea for wherever animals areand exist, rest assured we will be able and ready and willing to advance the self-serving cause of our speciesism.
The reasons defy the seasons as the twin magnetic field of palate and profit is all that counts. So this poem perhaps puts our quintessential question into perspective:
Who sees the real You
Confucius said we should not do anything
To others that we would not do to ourselves
Though whether he said that after seeing
The bodies on the abattoir shelves
The bodies on the butchers' shelves
The bodies on the circus shelves
The bodies on the designer shelves
The bodies on the experimenters' shelves
The bodies on the freedom-fighters' shelves
The bodies on the gallows-birds' shelves
The bodies on the hook shop shelves
Without a fair-minded honest jury of twelve
That can analyse lies and continue to delve
Remains as unknown as his shrunken bones
Yet we know that unlike Pilate and Judas
The lesson worth the learning
Was the one lived by the noble Confucius
Yet it remains unsanswered for most if not all of us.
For it is so much easier to pursue to a folly as if it was of value and bask in the human conspiracy of others against those who do not look like us although know they certainly feel like andno less than us in their own ways.
Time-bomb Heart
It's a beautiful day
Let's go out and destroy something
There's a blood-red sky kissed by a passing wispy cloud
Blood on the lips of the circling hungry vulture crowd...
It's a beautiful day
Let's go out and murder truth
Even if justice is blind we cannot conceal truth to save our collective conscience.
