Bread And Butter

Before promoting Meat-Free Monday food,

Reflect: a livelihood from cutting-edge

Excisions is the future you’ve pursued,

And butchers’ bread and butter isn’t veg.

Don’t bang the drum for ultra-processed leaf

And bean if daily bread’s from beef.com.

No meat’s not healthier. And where but beef

Does bread and butter get its butter from?

Be mindful you’re a farm trainee. Don’t bash

Us farmers with your gimmick: it’s not true

That livestock farming turns the earth to ash.

The farm will fight the changing climate through

Exhaust controls on cows—unless they’re gone …

Relearn which side your bread is buttered on!

 

Mike Mesterton-Gibbons is a Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Florida State University who has returned to live in his native England. His acrostic sonnets have appeared in Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Better Than Starbucks, The Creativity Webzine, Current Conservation, the Ekphrastic Review, Grand Little Things, Light, Lighten Up Online, MONO, the New Verse News, Oddball Magazine, Rat’s Ass Review, the Satirist, the Washington Post and WestWard Quarterly. The poem was prompted by the Metro story, “College that teaches slaughtermen and butchers tried to promote Meat Free Mondays.”