warehouse echoes.
Conveyor belts, fans move waste out of the building.
Auto-controlled doors and gates open and shut,
move the product through process.
An occasional shout, a man’s voice or laughter.
Echoes off the high ceiling.
No natural light here, only fluorescent buzz as batches of
product are jostled into the work bay, hooked up to various
hoses and connectors that keep things from moving.
A worker swipes a chip reader over each piece, computer
logs mass, output, chemical composition etc.
Hoses whisk fluids away. Air has the unique scent of a factory
at work, machine oil, cigarette smoke, and other things.
Gate clanks up for the next batch.
Pay is not much. Languages spoken here, several.
Long hours 4 a.m. to 4 p.m. when the guys troupe to their Chevy pickups
and rusted beater Fords to drive home or to a nearby bar for a beer,
To listen to the game.
Trucks come during the night shift and load products into
trailers for the long haul.
Night shift workers at other factories with other smells (death and fear)
unload them for the next stage.
Forklifts of new parts,
the end result, frozen,
boxed and driven away,
stacked, displayed
in more fluorescent light
in other big windowless buildings.
There was no freedom from start to finish,
no buttercups and daisies,
nursing calves and their mothers
in sun-dappled fields. Calves, taken at birth. Fed from red buckets.
no spring through early winter, the long trail out of a barn at dawn
and the meandering line, stragglers at milking time.
Just the cold arms of a gate.
No lord bull roaring ownership from a far corner of the pasture,
mounting his girls. Males taken soonest.
Pregnancy by artificial means, plastic in rubber-gloved human hands.
Food, chemical-laden piles of stuff that resembles saw dust,
the hormones and antibiotics lacing it to increase output cause
too-early puberty in human children and cancer of reproductive systems.
Fast food chains push burgers and bacon and cheese on everything.
A sexless, udderless blue and white cow in the TV ad
for lactose-free milk. Someone complained that you can’t milk
an almond so don’t call it that.
Maybe not, but almonds don’t have the intelligence of a human
3 year old nor the ability
to recognize and remember
family members. Who ever said
we should be in charge?
The Danish Agriculture & Food Council, identity pictures from Danish Crown
