Albatross: An Anthology of Animal Rights Poetry

Albatross combines the hard-hitting triad of animal rights poetry in An Animal's Charter and Blue-bird sings the Blues and Jungle Judge Justice within a single volume.



Together the anvil striking poems and tough calling-down prose encapsulate the practice and use in all aspects of our animal abuse. The subjects run the gamut suffered by our subjects from abattoirs to zoos, from trophy hunting to killing kangaroos and from fast fading mist gorillas to the appearance of serial killers.



Albatross shows the ones who fall at our feet as well as those we choose to wear and eat. The poetry of our legal animal slavery is compared to how we have treated others who are vulnerable too in the graphic connection between racism and sexism and speciesism. In doing so we see the pale imitation of camouflaged cruelty in the pursuit of our conspiratorial truth towards injustice.



Human rights are beyond price because with them we can live and die with dignity. Animal rights are denied by us yet they are essential for the selfsame reason. Animals must be members of rather than numbers in our society where they are mere statistics of misery. Their fate and fortune and future in our scheme is the broken-winged theme of Albatross.



Review of the work:

They are very powerful poems: Animal Equality

The undercover agents are deeply moved by the poems: Mercy for Animals

It's wonderful to see the intersectionality you're exploring between societal issues and our environment: Claire L

Noël Sweeney certainly knows his stuff. You can tell he is passionate about the subject: Les S

These are very touching and beautiful poems: Animal Justice

Your poems are powerful and evocative works of art: Megan S

Your beautiful and powerful poem: 'A Whale of a Time': Tiffany



As these poems span all aspects of our animal abuse they are positively not for the pusillanimous. The poetry ranges across air and land and sea for wherever animals areand exist, rest assured we will be able and ready and willing to advance the self-serving cause of our speciesism.



The reasons defy the seasons as the twin magnetic field of palate and profit is all that counts. So this poem perhaps puts our quintessential question into perspective:

Who sees the real You

Confucius said we should not do anything

To others that we would not do to ourselves

Though whether he said that after seeing

The bodies on the abattoir shelves

The bodies on the butchers' shelves

The bodies on the circus shelves

The bodies on the designer shelves

The bodies on the experimenters' shelves

The bodies on the freedom-fighters' shelves

The bodies on the gallows-birds' shelves

The bodies on the hook shop shelves

Without a fair-minded honest jury of twelve

That can analyse lies and continue to delve

Remains as unknown as his shrunken bones

Yet we know that unlike Pilate and Judas

The lesson worth the learning

Was the one lived by the noble Confucius



Yet it remains unsanswered for most if not all of us.



For it is so much easier to pursue to a folly as if it was of value and bask in the human conspiracy of others against those who do not look like us although know they certainly feel like andno less than us in their own ways.



Time-bomb Heart



It's a beautiful day

Let's go out and destroy something



There's a blood-red sky kissed by a passing wispy cloud

Blood on the lips of the circling hungry vulture crowd...



It's a beautiful day

Let's go out and murder truth



Even if justice is blind we cannot conceal truth to save our collective conscience.