Dr. Seuss Meets Josef Stalin

Many moons ago I thought I might try my hand at writing children's books. It seemed an easy enough job: be simple, innocent and entertaining. Well, as you can probably tell by the content of this blog, it was the middle part I had trouble with.

Here is a short Dr. Seuss-like poem I wrote during this period. It starts off well but then veers off into someplace dark near the half-way spot.

The Chicken Coup

Have you ever noticed, in television or in books, how chickens in fryer farms live in rows inside tiny little nooks?

They seem to wait there patient, comfortable with their fates, while chefs around the world plan new ways to serve them upon dinner plates.

Well, contrary to popular opinion, which keeps our consciences clear, chickens know their days are numbered and just choose to hide their fear.

They sit inside their cages, kept alive on mere crumbs, and dream of the freedom they’d enjoy had they only been given thumbs.

With the ability to grasp an object, you see, which is exactly what hands can do, they could emulate the Bolsheviks and organize a coup.

It’d start with late night meetings, hushed tones beneath the moon, with a feathered Lenin urging revolution by overthrowing the farmer goons.

Above them would fly banners, held aloft with each chicken’s hand: “Rise Up Poultry Masses” they’d urge, “Down With Colonel Sanders” they’d demand.

Then one fateful day, behind the naive chicken farmers’ backs, handbills from an underground press would appear, signaling the attack.

Pistols would be brandished, pulled from feather lined nests, with wings sporting revolutionary bands and bodies: Kevlar vests.

The farm workers would then be taken, captured by surprise, and single file out the gates marched with blindfolds over their eyes.

Then to show that they meant business, and weren’t shy about blood being shed, the birds would line the workers up and shoot each man in the head.

Each corpse of every farmer would be bulldozed, pushed into a shallow mass grave, the first pawns to be disposed of in a great revolutionary wave.

The flock would soon form a government, by and for its own kind, with every chicken created equal and quite free to speak its mind.

Then chickens the world over would come together, in a great and tearful rejoice, reveling in the knowledge their collective beak had at last been given voice.

But, as with anything good, so would this eventually fail, since it is the nature of things that nothing of virtue shall, in the end, truly prevail.

For from within the flock there would emerge an evil pullet, an ego driven bird, one who held his own views so high as to ban all others’ spoken word.

This feathered Stalin would scour the flock, vigilant for voices of dissent, and silence them with his troopers until the opposition movement was spent.

But I apologize for my long-windedness, and because I have digressed. For this tale of a poultry revolt is not only tiresome but a moot point, at best.

For they know, as well as us, that such things will never be, a chicken’s place is in a cage or on a plate and never roaming free.

So just don’t think poultry are happy with their lives or that they’re merely dumb. It’s just that revolutionaries need dexterity and chickens don’t have thumbs.