Here's a poem about battery farming.
And battery farming is behind most of the meat that we eat.
And it's one of the more unpleasant aspects
of our society.
We don't like to think about it.
Every society has had things they don't like to think about.
But it's inhumane.
And it produces tasteless meat.
Two bad things about it.
I make a reference in this poem to the Hurons,
which was an Indian nation, who were constantly
at war with the Iroquois.
Virtually none of the Hurons survive.
The ones that didn't get killed got forcibly adopted
by the Iroquois.
However, at the end of their battles,
they would eat their enemies, on both sides, both the Hurons
and the Iroquois actually, thinking
that they would become braver.
The braver the enemy, the more bravery you got into your body.
Also, there's one phrase I should explain,
that I should explain the spelling of anyway.
I've got one phrase at the end of the poem, dried in thyme.
And I'm speaking about the herb thyme, T-H-Y-M-E.
Meat.
My brother saw a pig root in a field
and saw too its whole lovely body yield
to this desire which deepened out of need,
so that in wriggling through the mud and weed to eat and dig
were one athletic joy.
When we, who are the overlords, destroy our ranging vassals,
we can therefore taste the muscle
of delighted interest we make into ourselves, as formerly,
Hurons digested human bravery.
Not much like this degraded meat, this meal of something.
Was it chicken, pork, or veal?
It tasted of the half life that we
raise in high bright tombs, which days and nights like days
murmur with nervous sound from cubicles.
We're fed on treated slop.
The living cells expand within each creature forced to sit,
cramped with its boredom in its pile of shit
until it is standard weight for roast or bacon and terminated
and its place is taken.
To make this worth a meal, you have
to add the succulent liberties it never had of leek or pepper
fruiting in its climb.
The redolent adventures dried in thyme
whose branches creep and stiffened where they please,
or rosemary which shakes in the world's breeze.
[APPLAUSE]