Ox and The Great Big Identity Trick

by Martin Hayes

Ox wants more food in his bowl
he wants the hours he spends strapped into Farmer’s plough
reduced

Hen wants to lay her eggs
au naturel
not forced out of her
by a billion-pound industry
who keeps mucking around with the light

Raven wants to hunt Worm
sitting in a tree of an early morning squawking up at the sun
coaxing the blues out of her black back
rather than having to stand on a slag-heap
pecking through plastic to get at the proteins and fat
she needs to carry on her struggle

Pig doesn’t want to be boxed into a shed and fed pellets
that bloats and makes her develop fat deposits
in places she doesn’t want
she wants to be left alone
to snort and rummage through the scrub
until she becomes naturally fat
for slaughter

that, she can handle

Cow wants to fall in love with Ox
her milk to be a secret
only shared with her offspring
not to be artificially inseminated
by any old oxen’s sperm
over and over again
so that all she has become
in some eyes
is a walking barrel of milk

Kestrel wants to glide
high up in the blue and everlasting
looking for things he can push back his wings at
then nosedive
not this slag-heap of dead dreams and boiling landfills
filled with the rubbish of one-eyed men
who think they are king

Hare doesn’t care
Hare just darts about
here and then there
running as fast as he can
hoping that nothing will catch him
like it seems to have caught everyone else

every animal on the farm
wants what they want
as Farmer sits in the safety of his farmhouse
laughing away at his luck
as not only does God obviously love him
but it seems that all the animals
have fallen for The Great Big Identity Trick
become so wrapped up in themselves
that they’ll never get together now
to burn his farmhouse down