AGRIBUSINESS,

a pastoral

 

                                    The milk production farm,

                                                a thousand cattle strong,

is biologically controlled by its design.

A workforce in white coats

and rubber gloves devotes

its anxious care behind the No Admittance signs

to newborns in their cells.

Our tour guide proudly tells

how Baby gets colostrum fed by intubation,

then is bottled like

a Skinner-managed tyke.

In a grass-free lot with row on row of sheds,

each hut has its growing cow,

chained to it like a hound;

unlike a dog, she’s never entertained and petted.

Growth accomplished for

this lot, their bits of earth

are scraped away by ‘dozers and replaced with clean.

The move to an adult barn

ties the milker down

to stanchions for her life; there are no pastures here.

The monstrous udders of some

are seen to brush the ground.

 

“It’s all about production,” our modern Virgil boasts.

“From artificial insemination to the market,

nothing is wasted.” Even the dead make saleable compost.

A cow is melting, wrapped in her sawdust sheets and blankets,

she and her bedding becoming one.  “There is no smell.”

One of the ladies asks how she died.  “Calving,” he tells her,

then translates, “She died giving birth.” A murmur

of dismay, a keening, breezes among the women,

recalling the times it could have been oneself,

how close one came with this child or the other to death.

“A loss;” he adds, “A fresh cow’s worth a lot of cash.”

 

Only visitors from another world

could feel for the poor lost cow-girl, her pain and failure,

for to allow her to be fully creature

will allow her to be somewhat human.

One is put in mind of those Egyptian

gods with animal and bird heads, only

the body in man’s image to make them holy.

Shall we call her Sylvia,

who in life was just a number

stamped upon her ugly regulation earrings?

Granted, the better people tired

of executions, cockfights.

But say, what peace is possible

between the hammer and the forge?