Nuits Balneaires, Lions’ Lament (Artist Instagram)
We were stabled in a scorched mosaic of smoke & fire, while another story blazed beyond the gates. Gone the splendour of our manes, mangy & matted, laurels of sorrow slanting over irises cloudy with want. Gone golden musculature, now disheveled sacks, the fretwork of bone shredding flesh.
We sank to our scrawny haunches, rangy limbs crackling beneath us like kindling, too weak to whittle down the bars with our jaws. We hallucinated antelopes ripening at sunset, scarlet racks of meat, glinting pools of water.
O, how we envied the spider drifting between bars, toward the greening spires of the forest, toward the high nucleus of midday sun, unseen from where we sat, in the stench of our own unbecoming.
Hunger tames, but starvation slays. To live beyond our bodies, to wither, to wane. This is what betrayal tastes like: tawny grit of dust, gunpowder, torched tires searing our throats.
Abundance exists only in the larvae ripening in the pungent air.
Near the end, we fed on the diminishing dark & the syllables of birds — in this citadel we would never leave.
A tire hung from a rope: a garrote, a gaping mouth & beyond that sightless eye, we saw the zoo wardens as good as hogtied. The need for forgiveness, pressed like a blade, against their throats.
Note: The three lions died of starvation, despite the zoo wardens’ best efforts to feed them during the post-election crisis. They are buried under the ancient trees near the zoo.