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Sacrificial Rabbit

I’m a rabbit that glows in the dark,
A flopsy, fluorescent and green:
Not for me a good nose in the park –
It’s really not my kind of scene.
At night when the foxes and vixens debauch,
I shine like a steady and luminous torch.

They crossed me with jellyfish, yes,
So the lighting inside me’s incessant.
But it wasn’t done under duress,
And I hope, now I’m so luminescent,
That it saves a few lives, a reward on its own.
You’d do it for me, you’re not all hearts of stone.

Supposing a dose of uranium
Pushed straight down a human’s long tongue
Helped a bunny who had a sore cranium –
You’d queue up, the old and the young,
To help solve the headache, whatever your class,
Though it meant that a beacon shone out of your arse.

They say that you’re breeding like us,
And that Britain has litters of sprogs –
Volunteer them, and don’t make a fuss.
Make amends for the fruitbats and frogs
And the rats and the mice, and also the rabbit.
Animal testing’s a very bad habit.

We’ve all got to die in the end
(Was that Hamlet or Watership Down?) –
Now you’ve young’uns to spare, you can send
Them to labs. They’re all over the town.
We’ve done our bit. I shine out like a furnace.
Both of us know what taking your turn is.


Click here for a Guardian story about rabbits


Click here for a Guardian story about the baby boom


Click here to buy Bill’s poetry collection Ringers


Click here to follow Bill’s New Statesman research
 

Sacrificial Rabbit

Scientists from Turkey and Hawaii have created rabbits that glow in the dark. Britain is experiencing a baby boom.
 


16 August 2013

POETRY KIT WEBRING

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