|
Death of a Whale
When the mouse died, there was a sort of pity;
The tiny, delicate creature made for grief.
Yesterday, instead, the dead whale on the reef
Drew an excited multitude to the jetty.
How must a whale die to wring a tear?
Lugubrious death of a whale; the big
Feast for the gulls and sharks; the tug
Of the tide simulating life still there,
Until the air, polluted, swings this way
Like a door ajar from a slaughterhouse.
Pooh! pooh! spare us, give us the death of a mouse
By its tiny hole; not this in our lovely bay.
-- Sorry, we are, too, when a child dies:
But at the immolation of a race, who cries?
|
|
Hidden away by the fighting of a World War, a hateful, audacious
attempt by the Turks to subdue some Armenians faithful to Jesus
who were in the area resulted in a huge, horrific slaughter - at
least a million that were shot, impaled, flayed, asphyxiated or
starved to death. Yet the wider world totally forgot this ugly,
egregious episode with incautious haste - unlike the Jewish Shoah
that echoed it, it yielded few memorials; few history lectures
are taught; few Hollywood features have hitherto been filmed...
There are no Armenian Holocaust apologists. There do not need to be.
|
A true tale. (Allegedly.)
There was a wee mouse in the stove of a dilapidated old share
house. It used to emerge from a hole daily at much the same time
for food. The guys threw their knives at it when they were bored,
and as a joke tried asphyxiating it with gas. Finally they tried
the usual. But their hardware shop just had a great huge rat trap,
which a wee mouse won't usually release. So they filed it down to
a hair-trigger... when it went off, with a huge, loud noise, it
pounded the animal so forcefully that both of its little eyeballs
shot out of their orifices and bounced across the room.
|
