It was one of the most abidingly sad, haunting images I have ever seen.
A lone camel pulling a cart through the roads of my remembered childhood,
The abandoned creature shuffling through the leafy suburban streets.
That swinging shuffle, mesmerizing the creature,
Its eyes staring straight ahead but surely not seeing,
The weight on its hind legs tempered, for now, by that swinging,
Shuffling gait, momentarily relieving left, then right, of the strain,
Only to be taken up again.
If you were in the desert, under the sun, we could say
These were your last days, you have not far to go, it’s almost done,
Carry on in honour, when you go you can say
You have lived your span.
It would be finite, closed, round, foreseeable.
But here, where is your destiny?
What point your labour?
Where your master, your enslaver?
In their absence I fear it is all of us, complicit and responsible.
There is no sense, nor glory, in pulling that cart of wettened, rotting straw.
Nobody wants it. There is no destination save the end.
And it may come soon, for when that swinging, shuffling gait
Finally thrusts all the weight
onto a side that gives,
No longer willing or able to take the strain,
The keel will turn and everything will come
Crashing,
Listing slowly at first but then too fast for memory to capture, you’ll be down,
The cart will become immeasurably heavy.
Too tired to be surprised, you will never rise again.
You will be left in your final incongruity, for no-one will care,
Until someone sees fit to put a bullet through your head for your redundancy.
And so what should I do? Follow?
I would love to capture your image, for what it would mean to me,
Something of myself it could express.
But how? For a still image to explore your gait?
No, I shall have to wait until you have finally fallen.
And I shall let the focus fall on your eyes,
And your eyes shall speak to the viewer for me.
Who can tell if those eyes will be as haunted as I,
Having witnessed your final fall?
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