by Blair Benjamin
—from the Second Book of Samuel
Picture an ordinary Moabite lion pit.
Picture a starving 9th century BCE beast.
Not Aslan—that cheap Christ allegory,
that vain withholding 1950’s colonialist.
This one not witch-stabbed, not spell-cast,
not resurrected. Stabbed, yes, most likely.
But killed off-hand, an afterthought,
meriting just half a biblical verse—
another day’s work of a mighty ancient
with name to be made, pits to be entered,
foes to be felled. No fable in this hacking.
Now remember Cecil the Lion, arrow-shot
dead by Walter the Minnesotan dentist.
Summon a thought of Cecil—lion-victim
turned cause célèbre, muse of meme-makers
and death threat writers—from the digital dross
of a decade past. I bet you didn’t know
one of Cecil’s survivors, Xanda,
was also big-game killed soon after.
Neither did I. Minds turn to fresh outrages.
Of course lions are being led
to slaughter. That’s to be expected,
because we’re in deep pit now,
pawing up to own tar-seeped La Brea,
a hundred American Lion fossil
skeletons crawling aside to make room.
Unaccustomed to hunger, we arrive
oblivious at our death pit, nose around
for some undecayed flesh, tear a little off here,
shoo some flies away there, and soon find
ourselves trapped. No hunter-dentist is coming
to myth us, no tooth-seeking prehistorian
coming to pry us out. We’re on our own,
to gnaw our limbs off above the muck,
or learn to love our new tar home.
For a while, between the fires, there are still
times of snow, gently layering our soft fur.
We catch the flakes on our long lion tongues,
and think of the days we reigned,
recalling the speed, the chase, the kill.
Blair Benjamin’s writing has appeared in Atticus Review, Bluestem Magazine, North American Review, Pithead Chapel, Rust + Moth, Spillway, Storm Cellar, Sugar House Review, Tampa Review, The Madison Review, and The Threepenny Review, among others. He is the Founder of the Studios at MASS MoCA and Director of Assets for Artists, a nonprofit organization providing career support and capacity-building to artists and writers across New England.