Battery Hens

This is their provenance; this is their grave:
a cage roomy as a banquet hall, filled with row
upon row of cages, three hens to each. Heads,
black-feathered, red-combed, poke through wire
down the hangar's length: eye after staring eye.
As at a rest home, sunblinds that can be raised
for air. But not today. In the green dimness,
mounds of grey droppings multiply like sponge:
their only history — archeology of chicken
after chicken into hen — and their only product,
except for untold eggs and, at the end, their own
numbed flesh, its loss their one clear memory.
But it is the sound that wedges open the mind —
so few ordinary farmyard squawks above that low
swelling surge: one corporate cry hovering,
pressing out into the day. A throatless bird
trying to sing; a wingless bird trying to fly.