You see, I heard the screams of my dying father,
as his body was ravaged by the cancer that killed him
And I realized…I had heard those screams before.
In the slaughterhouse, their eyes
stabbed out and their tendons slashed,
on the cattle ships to the Middle East
and the dying mother whale
as a harpoon explodes in her brain
as she calls out to her calf.
Their cries…were the cries of my father.
I discovered when we suffer, we suffer as equals.
And in their capacity to suffer, a dog is pig,
is a bear….is a boy.