Gacela of Animal Theory

Every time I explain Schrödinger's cat to the animal
right's activist, the theory scurries away like a mouse
when she asks, who does such a thing to their cat?

The nature documentary shows the lion cub attacked
by a pack of hyenas, after it cried for long hours into darkness
for its missing mother. It is not the camera that is cruel.

What was the tiger's crime?— robbed of his skin, his claws
and his penis. Having lived where a farm might someday be,
hungry for the cattle we raise for our own bellies.

My grandfather had a hollowed elephant foot for a trash can.
I went to bed with dreams of a herd of three legged elephants
thrashing the brush, looking for their tusks and feet.

The sheep, at night, sleep in their dreams of losing their legs
and becoming cumulus, floating like gods over the moaning
faces of slaughterhouses. The moon cradling their fears.

No one knows the animal padding the long terrain
of moonlight, splendid in its coat, is a metaphor,
a device, a vehicle in which the message arrives.

Copyright © 2007 J. P. Dancing Bear All rights reserved
from Gacela of Narcissus City
Main Street Rag Publishing Company
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission