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
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