We are Sheep

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

Following along.

The previous posters.

Shame on me.

[sweetheart]

1. Sheepfold

Sheep on the hill, folded by dogs,
filthy and unwashed standing unconscious in their own shit,
penned in to stone temples for slaughter en-masse,
observing the human existance coming and going,
from mountains on every continent, sheep, wondering..
..and while they wonder, they're dipped sheared and clipped,
shorn of their bounty, stripped of their worth,
left on the hill, naked and cold,
huddling in craven quaking groups a fear the predators of wold.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

2. Wow! who wrote that?

[sweetheart]

4. a sheep

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

5. L,OL, God, I love that

[TallahasseeGrannie]

7. On behalf of the sheep lobby.

I must counter that sheep have a inner wisdom borne of the ages. Perhaps you must have experienced being chased up a tree by a ram to understand this. They're unique.

But it is a powerful poem, if misguided.

[sweetheart]

8. Temerous with a predator though

They are, IMO, like hindu cows, sorta, sacred beings like all setient beings, yes,
but they are indeed very skittish, and are spooked to a panic by perceived predators
to behave in truly the stupidest manner, that they kill themselves out of fear running
away from a predator over a cliff, when the predator was not even going to the cliff.

So whilst they are benign and "wise" animals, the flocks are all females, and the males
that would be the defenders to gore any predators are taken away to prevent incest, so
of course the spook and run is perhaps created by that.

I've watched a spooked sheep take out a farm fence before, they scare like no animal i'm
accustomed, and i have to wonder why they have this spook/fear built in, that cows don't
seem to have, that horses and other stock seem to not have, what is that heard fear
thing that has made them the butt of metaphor since ages of time.

They may not live in fear, but they do show fear in a way that when i wrote a
poem about human sheep, the animals seem just as appropos.

[Ghost Dog]

12. Yeah, it's not easy to calm down a spooked sheep

(and I do have hands-on experience: Yorkshire Dales, hi there in Scotland (though I'm long time in Spain)).

A bit like cats, in a very different way.

It pleases me greatly to be able to communicate, with a degree of quality, with both (and many other) species.

[sweetheart]

13. Yorkshire Dales to Spain

Malibu Mountains to Scotland, yet we know sheep.

We come from a world of disneyland fables where everybody grew up on a farm and knows
how ducks and sheep behave, how dogs and pigs, cows and horses behave in a social
situation, and how those primal behavours are subtly organlzied in human behaviour.
Yet, when nobody knows these stereotypes anymore, when 'swansong' spins on to myth the
silent perfect song i heard from many swan wings together flying over me on a silent meadow,
and when so much of the organic roots of our language are paved over with asphault,
until words and metaphors speak no sweat, no industry, no emotional class concern,
and just repeated lookups in somebody else's dictionary of how we should behave,
printed 10,000 years ago on the presses of then plutocratic wise; and here we go again,
yet the mist on the knolls, mohrs, kills, dales, glens and straidhs... the metaphor of
all living things intoned in to our love uncorrupted, a divine sense of the colour of the
animals of existance painted innocently across our fat bellies lest we die young.

And all the while, the sheep observe omnisciently on an omnipresent om.

[Greyhound]

11. Sheep are always happy to be sheep.

That is until the master reclassifies them from producers to mutton, then it is too late to complain.

[MannyGoldstein]

3. We The Sheeple

of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union for the Predator Class,

[wiggs]

6. This morning on AAR, Scooter was talking about how he doesn't

understand why there aren't 3 million people in Washington every week protesting this war and the administration. He doesn't understand why the bloodshed, violence, incompetence, corruption, deception, and wrong decisions are tolerated to the extent that they are. He doesn't understand why dc dems and dnc aren't rallying people to be outraged and active.

My kids were in the car and we were talking about it a bit. They agreed that things are pretty much normal for most people... just doing what they always do, trying to put one foot in front of the other: work, school, yard, family, vacations, etc., and thought that there should be more protests...but noted that we as a family aren't doing anything significant either.

I wonder what it will take.

[valerief]

9. A draft. n/t

[fed-up]

10. "The Sheep Look Up" by John Brunner (sci fi-great read-1972) n/t