I'm A Poet, Now You Know It

Three months ago, I started taking a college poetry class. Though I've been writing fiction stories since the second grade, I found writing poetry to be very challenging. However, I've also found that writing about what you are passionate about always makes for a better story, or in this case, poem. Since I am passionate about standing up against animal cruelty, I wrote a poem about exactly that. 

We live in a society with a continuous cycle of breeding animals, and then committing mass murders. Though it may be an extreme comparison, these mass murders of animals that end in lines or piles of bodies are exactly what happened during the Holocaust. Think about it. We see old pictures of naked human corpses in piles from concentration camps. We can also search the web and find pictures of animal corpses in piles from slaughter houses. Is there really a significant difference between what the names "concentration camp," and "slaughter house" really mean? I do understand the difference between murdering humans and murdering animals, but really, is there a difference? These ideas are ones that I explored in my spoken word poem below.  

Do You Ever Question Society?

By Caileigh Wasmer 

The world’s sanity

was buried

somewhere underneath those piles

of human bodies

when a man with a mustache

made us believe

there were superiors and inferiors

and yet,

we still

throw bodies into piles

and call it

humane

without really

calling it anything

and you may say

there is a difference between

the slaughtering of

man and animal

that leaves enough room for the

Earth

and the moon

and all the stars

and I might agree

because I see the difference

between piles of men

and piles of pigs,

but-

I see no difference.

We say they are not capable of feeling

the same way we are capable of feeling

but we watch them,

we watch them as they

squirm,

eyes pleading,

muffled squealing,

as we

gag,

throw,

stab,

tear,

chain,

electrocute,

snap their necks,

bullets through their brain.

we rip out their insides

we grind up their bodies

we put them in casing

we grill them

we put them between bread

which goes between our lips

as we watch fireworks above our heads as

we celebrate

our freedom

with the bodies of what used to be fellow

living earthbound beings

stuck between

our teeth.

You cannot look me in the eyes and tell me

this is the most compassionate way to exist.

I dare you to look me in the eyes and say

they are the animals.

I was able to share this poem with a high school English class when I went to teach them poetry with my professor and three others honors students a couple weeks ago. The reaction I got from them was satisfying as a new poet. My professor said she loved the poem, a fellow honors student of mine who is the president of the college poetry club said she started tearing up, and another honors student said if he wasn't already a vegetarian, he would have been convinced that he should be after hearing me recite my poem. Though these were nice things to say, I realized that it wasn't my actual writing that made them react in such a powerful way. I myself am still very much a novice when it comes to writing poetry. In fact, it wasn't even the way that I emphasized my points through spoken word, which is a more powerful form of poetry in itself. My point is that it was the content, the cold hard facts and the harsh comparison to the Holocaust that made people react. It is so easy to forget that what we are putting into our bodies for our own pleasure was actually once a living being that was murdered in a way we would never wish on our greatest enemy. It is interesting to me that when this is brought to peoples' attention, they react in such an emotional way. I've learned to love poetry, especially spoken word, and I hope someday my poetry about animal cruelty will change someone's point of view.

CW