Three magpies
Three magpies sit on the washing line, sharpening their beaks, while spring rain dots the concrete path.
Sonnet LXXXI
And now you are mine. Rest with your dream inside my dream. Love, pain and labour must sleep now. The night turns on invisible wheels and joined to me you are pure as sleeping amber.
No one else will sleep in my dreams. You will go — we will go — joined by the waters of time. No one else will travel through shadows with me only you — evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.
Your hands have already opened their delicate fists and let fall their soft, drifting signs. Your eyes closed like two grey wings,
while I follow the waters you bring that carry me onward: Night, Earth, wind weave their destiny. Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.
— Pablo Neruda, a version based on multiple translations
Fools and racing
If there is a point to this story about the Melbourne Cup, I fail to see it.
It’s easy to mock the sham glamour of the event. Horse racing (and the Melbourne Cup in particular) has always attracted the media hungry, the gauche, and the desperate minor celebrity. This in turn makes horse racing media-worthy — although it is hard to tell whether most people view attendees with interest or the appropriate degree of derision.
But it would be a fantasy to suggest that gambling, the media, the drunken events and their attendees, have somehow corrupted something pure, as though racing could ever be separate from all this. And the death of horses, too, is an inescapable part of horse racing.
The allegations of cruelty aren’t really about crippled horses that must be cordoned off and “destroyed”. But it is absurd to dismiss the possibility of cruelty because the “strapper, stablehand or equine vet” responsible for euthanizing a crippled horse, loves animals.
Put simply, the sport exists for people to gamble on animal cruelty.
The problem is that the author of the article doesn’t see the cruelty inherent in racing. A jockey may love horses, but it is a cruel and unusual love. To saddle a horse with leather, perhaps crafted from the skin of a dead horse, mount the horse and then beat it around a dirt track, is cruel.
Perhaps the death of one racehorse is not a tragedy. But it is senseless and unnecessary. The tragedy is that we continue to let it happen, for sport.
Lake Macquarie
Shaking the water off
