Little Bull Calf

Little  Bull Calf

With each shivering breath

You steam

The dank morning.

Your baby hooves
still soft from your birth

The day before

Are clumped with manure

From the sale yard floors,

Where you are sold

With the others.

Your umbilical cord
Hangs moist.

caked with filth
From shit covered floors.
Your eyes glazed in shock

Fear moves
Your mouth to nuzzle nothingness.

Your tongue curls

Instinctively to grasp a teat.
Little bull calf
Barely touched

By a mother whose warmth
They cannot erase.
When they wrenched you away,
You bellowed your surprise,

Now yearning etched in those eyes
Crying silently,
You stand muted
Among others

Whose only crime is to be
Born male

 When there is greater worth

In having an udder
And womb.

The latter’s produce

Discarded so easily

When the product of the former

Is siphoned off twice daily.

Some males kept to milk

Their seed, impregnating

Mothers who will never

Mother or be mothered

Your last sight of your mother
on her knees, bellowing
her nose buried in the wet placenta
where you spent ten months
Connected.
Your grieving and hers

Reverberates

Through the cosmos,

You have been robbed.