top of page
Search
Writer's pictureThe Red Wheelbarrow Poetry

A New Veterinarian Spends a Compulsory Year Working at a Slaughterhouse

Melissa Sussens


I have watched death.

Have become so familiar with slaughter

in the last 204 days that I will see it


with my eyes closed, even two years later --

My white gumboots splattered red,

the bare white walls and steel frames


echoing with the growl of saw

splitting sternum. The dull thud of another hide

tossed down a chute to somewhere other


than here. The cold death banging into me as I fight

my way through the crush of carcasses

to reach the chiller’s exit sign.


To survive, I separated myself

from the living, raced home

to scrub myself clean. No soap could chew


through the smell of sulphur of 800 sheep packed

tight as coffins in a mass grave.

I haunted the compulsory hours,


a silent witness to each ending,

there but not there.

I did not speak against


the prodders or the whips.

I did not remove the calf

left to watch its mother stunned.


I did not call out after the truck

overloaded into a trample of death.

Life was eviscerated and quartered,


every day. The person I thought I was, bled out.

No longer can I hold myself holy --

I am fifteen again, at boarding school, watching


two girls clamp the pillow over another’s head.

It takes five minutes until unconsciousness.

For two, I did nothing.


Just stood there, complicit.


Featured on 14 October 2021

First published in New Contrast issue 193 as 2nd prize winner in the New Contrast National Poetry Prize


0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

The Little Yellow House

Phelelani Makhanya There is a little yellow house at the corner of the street, where the jacaranda has painted the paving purple. Every...

Naughty Greens

Basil du Toit The rude vegetables are up to no good again, succumbing to irresistible inflations, their growth-tips, tautly congested,...

Evening Song (Durban)

Ari Sitas After a day of stoning and gas an ancient chore beckons by the ocean’s lip - a crowd heaving, heaving, sifting through the sand...

Comments


Post: Blog2_Post
bottom of page