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I had forgotten this. Wrote it last January, and am putting it up again in the hope that it might annoy someone.
The Silly Goose
I'm not a great fan of so-called deep ecology.
Tell me that the shark is top of a food chain
Which includes me, and I'm happy to slaughter
Every bloody one of them.
Pace loopy William Blake and daft junkie Coleridge,
Beasts merely irritate, unless I can eat them,
Milk them, or wear them. Leather boots are healthiest.
Leather belts last longest.
Then one day last summer, invited out to lunch, I
Was sitting in the garden, downing a cool Warka
When through the wire fence I saw an oldish grandmother
Hatchet in hand, grope
Under some planks on the ground. Then she pulled out,
Its legs twisted tight behind its back in her free hand,
A beautiful white goose, fattened for tomorrow's
Family banquet.
She stumbled over rough grass to a mossless tree stump.
The goose turned its head back to look. Saw what was coming,
Meekly stretched its neck straight over the block. Down
Swung the cruel axe. Blood.
Then, without appetite, wearily and sadly
I ate, drank, and smilingly made conversation.
I think it was carp, or trout - I don't recall much.
But I will remember
I think forever the glance that the silly
Goose gave her butcher, how, seeing axe and face,
All hope departed, she sadly stretched her neck out
Like any martyr.
We call geese "silly" - it used to mean just "harmless",
Like ducks and chickens. When I get my garden
I shall have some poultry, only for the eggs, though.
Let them die of old age.
But I don't care a damn for rare endangered species
Especially when dangerous. If I had my island
I'd have a pit where crocodiles, snakes, bears, and sharks
Fought to the death. Just
To annoy the Goodalls and the Attenboroughs,
People who rate animals as equal to humans.
Maybe chuck a few Greenpeacers to the crocodiles
To make up the food chain.
.
And I had forgotten. Many thanks to http://thatthebonesyouhavecrushedmaythrill.blogspot.com/2011/04/earth-day.html for reminding me.
Never mind, there's still time to make a bonfire of those old tractor tyres I was saving for something, and the local shop is still open, where they sell 'delfynki' (dolphin steaks).
I can barbecue them now but eat them tomorrow as they're meat.
But I still lack one spectacular gesture.......
72 year old Karl Marks Smells, was convicted yesterday on three counts of hate-speech at ----- Crown Court.
A Ms Methany Beesoms complained to Glastonbury police that Smells, alias Dawkins Twat, alias Hawking Twerp, alias E. U. Buggeroff, alias Blair Yuckie called her a "stupid witch" when she vomited over him after consuming a whole bottle of 'White Lightning'.
Ms Beesoms, a practising Wiccan, was deeply distressed by this insult to her religion.
The second count relates to Smells's calling her a drunken bitch. A passing transgendered poodle, represented in court by the ASL (Anti-Specist League) overheard this remark and became highly agitated until sedation could be administered.
The third charge was that Smells insulted Satanists by referring to Satan as 'the devil'.
Sentencing Smells to 6 months community service in a local coven and six months in a dogs' home, and recommending a period of anti-specism, transgenderism and multiculuralism awareness training, Mr Justice Goodthinkful remarked, "This is the worst case of this kind that I have come across in thirty years on the bench.
"You must realise that your attitudes, thoughts, and behaviour are totally unacceptable. The fact that you were on your way to a so-called 'wedding' is no excuse, and indeed highlights the dangers to the Big Society of religious extremism.
You will now learn to live in the Big Society."
As I have mentioned before, once a month on the Saturday closest to the full moon, a group of us meets in the forest around a huge bonfire. We sing, play music, eat, and drink. Usually at about 10.30 p.m. we go to someone's house for a few more drinks until maybe midnight or later.
Most Poles love singing.
Last time, in my flat, there were about ten people aged forty to eighty plus, and one friend, who could be Brezhnev's double, sang an old Christmas carol which he had learned from his grandmother some seventy years ago. It was ancient, modal, and very beautiful, Our Lady singing a lullaby to Jesus.. No one else had ever heard it before. The women were dabbing their eyes with handkerchiefs and the men looked close to tears. I too. That's how beautiful it was.
Determined that this jewel should not be lost, I recorded him singing it. He then sang more and more, which I recorded. There was not a dry eye in the room.
Another innocent Polish pleasure is winding up foreigners.
He finished, with a sly grin, by singing a song, in Polish, which I had definitely heard before. I asked him, "Is that a carol"
"Maybe not," he replied, giggling.
"Is it Polish?"
"I 'm not sure." His wife was looking enigmatically at the ceiling.
He carried on singing it, and I joined in, in English. It was "Ghost Riders in the Sky" sung by Anne Shelton around 1949.
I told him. He howled with laughter, more drink appeared, and my reputation for naivety suffered a severe blow.
I love it here.
Sonnet
It’s funny looking back. When I was young,
I thought I’d be a poet and turned out
Some six half-decent lyrics worth a shout,
A hundred which are better left unsung.
Rifled my brain for tropes, bells not yet rung
Anything to be read and talked about.
Then came the cold suspicion, icy doubt:
I lacked poetic passion. So I flung
My work away. Now, altered, old, and tired,
I footle in my verbal potting shed:
Ideas like bulbs and seedlings dry and dead,
Their germination date long, long expired.
Hot bilious anger's now my motivation,
Polemic doggerel its sublimation.
