What the Turkey Might Say

Hey, remember me?
I’m the bird you shat away last Thanksgiving,
not so different from all the other turkeys
that got the same treatment
every other Thanksgiving of your mean little life.

So probably not.

I was bred to die and be forgot.
In this I was never consulted.
You are all power and I am all weakness.
No volume of gobble could have saved my delicate neck
one minute from your axe, no plea,
no prayer. Nor did you treat me especially well
when I was alive—(although, to be fair,
not especially poorly either. I plucked around the yard
with room to spread my wings
and peer now and then through the fence
imagining my wild cousins fleeing foxes or coyotes).

The kindest thing you ever did was hide my fate.
But it wasn’t out of kindness that you hid it.

There are those among your kind
who condemn you
for this indifference you show
to lives you think beneath your own.
You dismiss them.

But you’re all eaters in the end.
Eaters always pardon other eaters.

Let me tell you a secret, my friend:
I’m with you on the vegans.
Shut down those do-gooding, hysterical, dangerous twits.
No, I don’t want to die any more than you.
I want to exist.
But dying is what I am for.
It’s why I was made.
But for this, this sack of molecules
would never have been collected in this universe
to be this bird.

Better a short doomed life than no life at all, I say.

And so, if I were to speak, this is what I might tell you:
In the end I’m grateful to have existed at all,
grateful to have suffered this candle-flame of being.
I’m destined to be your food.
That works for me.

But no, it does not mean
I thank you. I don’t excuse you
your cruelty.
It doesn’t change who you are.
If I could speak I’m pretty sure I’d repeat:

Remember me. Remember me
when you gobble me down. Remember me
when you sit before the TV pondering the pigskin. Remember me
when your eyelids droop at the end of your long hard day. Remember me too
when you shit me away. Remember me especially
at the end, when you bow your head low
to pray.