Animals are Passing from Us | Paul Levine

I always respected the choice of veganism and vegetarianism both in the morality and positive effects on the body. I grew up in a world of meat dishes that my senses salivated for, recipes made by hands who know just the right amount of spice to sprinkle from years of feeding loved ones. But I also grew up in a world of meat dishes that never had a source beyond the label to me, slab of muscle so white-marbled red that I could not imagine the body that once breathed. I never witnessed their death nor what the walk to the end of their breath looked like.

I found out my dad worked at a slaughterhouse for a short season. He described, in dusty discomfort, the way fear emanated from the pigs. They knew something horrible was to come by my father’s footsteps, probably sensing that discomfort emanating from him. Though Paul Levine was just a neighbor to the Spanish Abbatoir (slaughterhouse), he writes of the same discomfort in his poem.

suffering the consumers
who won’t meet their steady eyes
for fear they could see.

Is that death worth the pleasure? Is it worth the communal appreciation for the hands that prepare the creature once alive with steady eyes? Their eyes express fear just like me, a realization that is shifting the way I look at my plate. I’d be lying to you if I told you I have a clear conscience about it, but that is where poetry challenges even the most settled morality, a morality that my muscles don’t fully understand even as I am eating muscle. Oh my.

You can hear Paul read it himself: Animals Are passing From Our Lives - Poetry Archive

[Book of Delights pg. 47 | No. 14 Joy Is Such a Madness]