The end of another year: Time to remember
The victims who wait, without hope
For the freedom they can only imagine.
The children and spouses who suffer daily
Behind closed doors
From the horrific abuses of those made sick
By civilization's relentless stresses.
The farmed animals, and those in pens
In laboratories, kennels and cages,
Places we dare not ever see inside,
For their meat, their organs, their blood,
The painful experiments that never end,
Or just locked up from neglect and ignored.
The poor, caught in a web of helplessness
In the struggling nations of the world, and
In our inner cities and ghetto suburbs everywhere,
And right next door, that neighbour
Alone, proud, out of sight and mind,
Living in constant solitude and dread.
And the creatures of all species
Fleeing civilization's relentless advance:
Clearcuts, clouds of toxins, cluster bombs
And the other technologies of 'development'
We never see because we do not want to see,
Improving the land to extinction.
On this day, one day closer to its demise
We think of the victims of civilization
And tell them we're sorry:
The authorities of this world
Say that we cannot afford
The ransom to spare them.
Like the agony
Of inmates of concentration camps
Institutions of 'correction'
And of the 'insane',
Slave labour centres
And gulags and prisons everywhere
In all human societies
Since civilization's terrible ascent,
Their suffering is all seen as necessary,
A cost of Progress.
And we are not yet ready
To learn these victims' awful truths,
And to proclaim that that cost is too high.
Their New Year will not be Happy.
Artwork: Overgrown by Cheri Ives, 2002 |
MADE IN CANADA
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