Service takes many forms. TS and TOS member Alan Harris, of Tucson, Arizona in the USA, might be said to serve through his poetry. He challenges us to ask deep questions about our attitudes and relationship with animals. We brought you some of Alan’s poems in June and share another four here.

Stray

As I gaze nightward at our
volunteer chandelier of stars
light-years away (each point
a twinkly memory of a light that was),

a white tomcat approaches me
like an old friend and brushes
my pant-leg, crying up from the snow
as if in hungry agony.

I fetch some dry cat food,
pour it into a Styrofoam tray
on my porch, and watch him
dine with great crunching.

My eyes in the blazing sky again,
I drink measureless ancient light
into my emptiness as a gift
from the magnificent All-of-it.

Is our future in the stars?
I laugh aloud into the night air,
feeling the moment so mightily
I care little for any answer.

The speckled black overhead ocean
absorbs my laugh with dignity
while the white stray, finished with his meal,
wipes his chin on my pant-leg.

A universe above and a cat below
circumscribe my being in this
delicate wintry instant --
love coming from both ways.

My Cow, My Guru

My brown cow
lives in the now.
How?
Nohow.

Quantity and time and hay slide
through her unnoticed. She
doesn't count her stomachs
or her breaths or her days.

She seeks no acupuncture
treatments, nor does she
brew herbal teas.

Being the best she can be
holds no interest for her as
she grazingly meditates with
slow-moving hooves and jaws
over a grassy pasture.

Her Buddhic eyes see
out and in all the way.

My cow knows an old, old mantra
that she neither flaunts nor hides --
when the world needs a moo,
she gives it one.

As her swishing tail
with Zen precision
scatters a bunch of flies
like unwelcome thoughts,
my brown cow's gaze is
inly intimating to me,
"No how is there to now."

Plowhorse

My horse and I are brothers,

and the morning sun knows why.

Within my horse resides

a soul, I’m pretty sure --

more wisdom than just to strain

and turn brown fields to black.

I’d guess this horse was human

in ages before the Ice,

but now for some dim reason

is sentenced to the plow.

Service, a horse’s essence,

had best be, too, my own

as we pull such plows as matter

into ages still to come.

My horse and I are brothers

and the morning sun knows why.

At the Abattoir

Splat.
Grunt.
Plop.

We feed the world,
except for bloodless vegetarians.
Come hither, sweet swine,
and we will make you useful,
oh, so useful to mankind:

Thud.
Rip.
Crack.
Slit.

Cow, your life-long destiny is consummated here.
Your epitaph reads "Grade A, choice."
Your burial ground, the maw of man,
is decorated with two rows
of tombstone teeth.