Everything is beautiful and I am so sad – Mark Nepo
We’ve had chickens for over ten years, during which our hens have given us over 11,000 eggs. I’ve built a secure coop to keep predators (abundant, even here in Oakland) out.
Despite those measures, possums have broken in on two occasions and killed several hens. The first event confronted me with a rather profound crisis. There I was, at 3:00 AM, standing in my bathrobe and flip-flops over two dead chickens (the possum hadn’t even eaten them, only bitten their heads off), shining my flashlight at about face level at a (probably very scared) possum sitting in the roost, unable to escape. I did a quick moral inventory: If I even could let it out of the coop, it would certainly get back in. So I had to set my nonviolent philosophy against my responsibility to protect my girls. The debate lasted about a minute. I killed the intruder as quickly as I could and felt quite bad about it.
This story is real, but it comes to me like a sequence of dream images.
Despite my attempts to shore up the cracks in the coop fence, another possum got in a couple of years later and killed a couple more of my girls. This time, with no internal debate, I quickly eliminated it, this time with extreme prejudice. C’est la vie.
I, like other chicken owners, also had another dilemma: what to do with older hens who had stopped laying eggs? I put the question to a local Facebook group and was quickly shamed into allowing them to die of old age. They were, after all, my girls and they had served me well.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends! – Shakespeare, Henry V
It’s October 19th, 2023. Hamas broke out of its pressure-cooker cage, entered Israel and, well, you know the rest. Well, I hope you do; the mainstream media disinformation has been unrelenting. Langston Hughes wrote of a similar pressure cooker 72 years ago:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.Or does it explode?
The border cage was quickly repaired, but Gaza has been without any new food or water for over two weeks, under continuous bombardment. 
Over 2,000 Gazan children are dead, murdered by predators who sit safely outside the fence. An Illinois man stabbed a six-year old Muslim boy to death after listening to conservative talk radio.
Joe Biden, before requesting another $100 billion in military aid, ghoulishly quipped that the “other team” had bombed the Gaza hospital in which 500 died, and his U.N. ambassador vetoed a resolution calling for a cease fire.
If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged. – Noam Chomsky
These obscenities – both the murders and the cruel rhetoric — are nothing new. In 2007, after Gazans had voted Hamas into power, Israel’s military calculated the minimum number of calories per day that Gaza residents would need to avoid starving, an average of 2,279 calories/day. After subtracting for locally produced food, they estimated how many truckloads would be required to prevent malnutrition and for three years allowed only that much food into the area. But hostilities continued and open warfare, along with mass bombardments like we’ve seen this week ensued several times. Israel has completely blockaded the border since 2016. Gaza’s median age is 18, so half its 2.3 million people, like my chickens, have never known any reality other than being fenced in to the world’s largest outdoor prison.
This land is mine, God gave this land to me. – Theme song to Exodus
Our local fence story began about the same time as the Hamas raid. A small skunk got into the coop somehow. Apparently uninterested in the chickens, it feasted at their feeder and (happily for us all), found its way out on its own, and has not returned.
Then on Tuesday, in the middle of the night, our upstairs daughter-in-law Emily (first to hear the shrieking), banged on the ceiling to wake us up. By the time I got something on, grabbed a flashlight and got down to the coop, the action was over: two of our girls were not only dead, they were nothing but carcasses, having been mostly eaten, and in a very short time. But there was no perp – I doubted it was a possum – and I couldn’t find any evidence of ingress.
Wednesday morning, I checked for breaches in the fence and again shored up some very small holes, but this was a mystery. I put the two carcasses into a garbage bag, sealed it tightly (dammit, it wouldn’t be garbage day until next Tuesday — this could really stink by then) and deposited it into a garbage can. That evening we left windows open. Fortunately, it was quite warm.
I heard the sounds at 1:00 AM. Prepared with bathrobe and flashlight at the ready, I raced downstairs, a knight set to do battle in defense of his ladies fair. What I found was one chicken on the ground, screaming a hideous lament, some tailfeathers missing, keeping her head wedged into a corner where the perp (What perp? There was no perp!) couldn’t get to it. The other two surviving hens were up in their roost. Again: no signs of ingress. What the fucking fuck???
1:30 AM: more sounds, she’s downstairs screaming, no perp present. I manage to calm her down.
2:00 AM: I can’t sleep. The sounds begin again. This time she’s gone from the coop, along with the perp. Mystified, I check the garden area outside the coop. She is lying on the ground, a ghastly, bloody sight, her head mostly bitten off – images of burnt Gazan children at the bombed hospital flash through my mind – and a big raccoon is staring at my flashlight.
Part of me demands revenge, or at least the necessary species-cleansing. I consider getting a shovel and killing it. But I’ve seen enough violence. I just chase it off. I turn back to the exterior of the coop, where I see a really small, maybe 6” x 15” tear in the chicken wire about three feet off the ground. The hen is still breathing. I’ll put her out of her misery later, but first I need to repair the breach. 
2:30 AM: There I am again, in bathrobe and flip-flops (all praise to warm Oakland Octobers), rooting through my woodpile for junk wood and screwing it into the studs of the fence as a temporary fix. I turn back around – the hen is standing up! – Is she in misery? I remember the book I’ve been reading just this week, Gordon Grice’s The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators, a discussion of the life patterns of some common predators, including black widow spiders and praying mantises, two species in which the females eat or kill the males just after or during copulation. He writes:
She (the mantid) is slowly eating the right half of his head…He doesn’t seem to mind. He stays on her back like some undersized Headless Horseman…she eats rapidly…The brain is not involved…The cockroach, a cousin to the mantid, has the same peculiar wiring…roaches are capable of learning; they can run mazes and can even be conditioned to flee darkness and love light. This later exercise has been replicated with headless cockroaches…Their learning ability is not in the head…Well it does need its head for eating. After a few weeks, a headless roach starves to death.
Of course, I’m mixing metaphors madly. But as Michael Meade has suggested, anything worth saying is worth exaggerating.
When the Israeli ground invasion begins, government spokespersons will deny any intentions of harming civilians — they killed 400 last night — and assert the necessity of “beheading” Hamas of its leadership. At some point, they will claim to have killed another “senior” commander. No one will feel safer. The Palestine Chronicle reports:
It is now common that when bodies of dead and wounded Palestinian civilians arrive at hospitals anywhere in Gaza, names of victims would be written on their wrists…so that their bodies might be identified and receive proper burial.
I get a bucket to transfer the wounded hen back to the coop to die peacefully. She really doesn’t seem to be in distress, or far less distress than when she’d been screeching a half hour earlier. As I shove her into the bucket she briefly screams again.
In The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker asked,
What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart… pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence…and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him.
Late Wednesday night: Sleep? Are you kidding? My mind is busy re-creating the crime scene:
The skunk finds or makes the tear in the chicken wire (3 feet up!) and enters the coop only to eat chicken feed, then exits when finished. A week passes without me noticing the tear. But the raccoon (hungry, resourceful, determined; perhaps it’s pregnant or a mother) certainly notices it, enters, kills the first two victims and leaves by the tear in the wire, which she has enlarged. I don’t notice it when I’m shoring up small breaches at ground level. The next night, it enters again, twice, but lights coming on and the sound of my footsteps running down the stairs chase it away (each time it must climb 3 feet of the interior chicken wire, squeeze through the tear and jump down). Finally, it decides, fuck this, I want that chicken! I’m taking her (hostage?) with me before that human can get back down the stairs. It re-enters, grabs her by the neck — and I can barely imagine this — climbs back up the interior 3 feet of chicken wire, squeezes both herself and the hen through the tear and escapes. An open and shut case.
Thursday AM: I pick up Emily’s compost bucket for the chickens and take out the chicken (!) bones from last night’s meal to put on the railing for the crows. I enter the coop. She’s still alive, standing without moving, her head area a bloody mess with flies crawling over it. I pass my hand back and forth in front of her, but she doesn’t react. She appears to be blind, but still standing, not even lying down, as I’ve seen chickens do when they’re dying.
What should I do? Put her out of her misery? Is she in misery? Certainly, she can and did express terror and/or fear– but misery? What is misery? Pain? Sadness? Should I kill her because she’s sad? Because I’m sad? What if I had caught the raccoon? Would I have hesitated (having crossed that moral bridge years ago) to kill it? Do the premature babies in Gaza hospitals feel any pain when their incubators stop working for lack of electricity?
If you’re lucky, you die quickly. – Gaza doctor, on Israeli missile wounds, when he has no anesthetics.
But doesn’t she, like all the other characters in this dream, exhibit an astonishing will to live despite her degraded condition? Does she, an animal who lacks our highfalutin’ human sense of purpose, imagination and intentionality, have a reason to go on living?
Yes! She lays an egg this morning! Blind and unable to eat, she lays a freaking egg!
Friday AM: She has died during the night – of what? Starvation? Dehydration? Generalized trauma to her central nervous system? Of, as Irish poet Evan Boland wrote, “…the toxins of a whole history”? Or, since she couldn’t see any more, how could she know where the other hens were? Did she die of loneliness?
You can’t die of loneliness in Gaza. At 15,000 people per square mile, including the rural areas, it’s the most crowded place on Earth. I suppose you could die of loneliness if your entire extended family (over fifty of them) has been murdered. Can anyone deny that the Jews of Israel have replicated the trauma of the Holocaust by inflicting it upon another people, or that Europeans have displaced their guilt for 2,000 years of pogroms onto Muslims?
Well, she’s out of her misery, if indeed she was in misery. I suppose it would make some kind of ecological sense if I were to throw her corpse into the bushes so the raccoon or some scavenger could at least recycle her body’s nutrients. But remembering what an uneaten animal smells like, or perhaps simply out of spite, I bag her. She joins her deceased sisters in the garbage can.
We’re down to two aging hens. I think of nature having culled the flock. Then I remember that, as Ramzy Baroud writes,
‘Mowing the grass’ is an Israeli term used with reference to the habitual Israeli attacks and war on besieged Gaza, aimed at delineating the need for Israel to routinely eradicate or degrade the capabilities of the various Palestinian resistance groups on the street. ‘Mowing the grass’ also has political benefits, as it often neatly fit(s) into Israel’s political agendas — for example, the need to distract from one political crisis or another in Israel or to solidify Israeli society around its leadership.
Some Israelis are tired of periodically mowing the grass. Chris Hedges reports:
The Israeli army mobilized Ezra Yachin, a 95-year-old army veteran, to “motivate” the troops…a member of the Lehi Zionist militia that carried out numerous massacres of Palestinian civilians, including the Deir Yassin massacre on April 9, 1948…”Be triumphant and finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind. Erase the memory of them…Erase them, their families, mothers and children,” he went on. “These animals can no longer live…Every Jew with a weapon should go out and kill them…If you have an Arab neighbor, don’t wait, go to his home and shoot him.”
If I could have, should I have let her live a few days and then die by starvation? What should we do with the children of Gaza? Allow another Nakba? Kill them all and put them out of their – our – misery, out, once again, of our awareness, out of the debilitating grief that will certainly arise when we can no longer repress that awareness – or just let them fester in that sinkhole until they all starve to death?
I am so sad and everything is beautiful – Mark Nepo
madnessatthegates 