(This Life) Part 3: The Butcher’s Wi(n)dow

Cherry

By bhi

Mon, 03 Jan 2022
  • 1694 reads
7 comments
 

 

Dark; line between earth and sky lost.

We move, grounded, path familiar,

following the soft rounded road

past the oak, The Plough, St Lawrence,

turn into The Street, sun now faint

bloodstained thin through the thick wet clouds,

cross by the sunk Methodist Church,

up the steep, on our left Crossways,

until we’re at Lyme’s Parade, where

N’Ville’s, The Butcher’s window stars,

carcasses spotlighted, displayed

strung on hook and chain, sinews stretched,

prime cuts custom trimmed, arranged

to showcase The Master’s cutting art.

  

The dogs are mesmerised, I too.

 

In the vaulted back shadows move,

stationed at their blocks disciples

chopping bones, crushing, slicing through

tendon, peeling flesh, paring fat,

working soundless upon the dead,

tantalising

                            brutal motions

transporting me back

to that church where five thousand sheltered,

and God could do no more than watch

as under his watch they were slaughtered,

blood harrowed into the cracked Earth,

body upon body laid, a grave

for itself, its past, its present,

this day, truncated by the machete.  

 

The dogs shift, restless, tuned to my thoughts;

deliberating morality

we head back home

taking the alley past The Barn.

Certificate 15
Poem
On the Theme of IS

Comments

Submitted by lenchenelf on

use of imagery to convey internal desolation at recall of horror (Rwanda?)

best to you 

Lena xx

 

Submitted by bhi on

Thank you, Lena. This is about Rwanda and the Ntarama Church which was supposed to be a sanctuary, but proved no match for the mob. 

There seems to be growing trend with butchers these days to dress their windows with their "goods" and thois one brightly lit at 6.30 in the morning and the staff inside preparing for the day just stirred the creative juices.

 

Bhi

 

Submitted by PilgermannBM on

You have not lost your touch, my dear friend. Your dogs seem to know more about morality than a lot of people I know.

Keep safe and well. P

 

Submitted by lenchenelf on

and one that weights your theme of individual morality and responsibility.

 It is only recently that Butchers once again find new customers by a display their goods in resplendent hung gore and fully feathered glory:  for a no. of decades, western society has distanced itself from Blood by a thin layer of plastic and supermarket/ News media set dressing.

I attempted to address this in an old poem

https://www.abctales.com/story/lenchenelf/art-cooking

 by demonstrating (in amongst other themes) how a childs morality of death and personal consumption is shaped by practice set within an artistic context of home overlayed with forensic pathology and commedia del'arte. What is Normal is often determined by our Patriachs, Elders, emboldened by our Peers.

Your poem is a challenge, carefully crafted to pull away a gauze between realities.

Curstey to you sir

best

Lena xx

 

Submitted by Di_Hard on

I don't understand why it is ok to eat meat. But as Lena raises there is something worse in a way, how life is stripped of any dignity in polystyrene trays and clingfilm, exchanges the wires of a cage for the lines in a barcode and never knows choice. Butcher's shops, we can see the creature was alive, it had legs like us, bled like us. If it is still alright to eat something that felt, feared, thought, then at least a customer to such a place has confronted what they are doing. Billions of creatures are slaughtered every year and we  try not to think about it so we don't have to care. As with people. A butcher's window is like a tv news screen. To see is to have to think about ? But how you describe the one where you live, it sounds like they are trying to make dead creatures look like art, showing off the craft of butchering. 

Going past the Barn on the way home, that you mention it is important? We think of barns as a place of safety for animals, but in the end, are not? Or the stable in the Nativity?

Am very glad you are writing again, these making me think poems!

 

Submitted by bhi on

Di, thank you for reading. I'm glad to be stretching my brain again!

]The new butcher's is very much a stylised art emporium injected with technology such as video walls showing the animals in the fields, looking contented and happy, if those terms could be applied to them, and then you have the contrast with the carcasses and cuts of meat laid out in the cold displays units. They've also added vegan isle, a bakery and vegetable section, appealing to as broad a customer base as they could. I'm fascinated by this synergy!

The Barn was meant to denote a place of safety and sanctuary, it's just a pit stop on the road to the butchers; it could have been fully romanticised but i wanted to have the ambiguity and let the reader choose how they read it.

B

 

Submitted by Di_Hard on

Gosh! I would never consider buying from a butcher unless it was for an animal. I wonder how many vegans do?