The greatest puppeteers since god was worshipped

Lion at Seapoint Beach: 10/14/14
CC Jean Stimmell

A great lion came from the distances.

It was huge as silence is,

He was thirsty, after the blood

And behind its posturing

It had fire…

[But] it found only solitude,

it roared, out of uncertainty and hunger -

the only thing to eat was air,

the wild foam of the coast…*

When I spotted this apparition at Seapoint Beach , the above lines from The Lion by the great poet, Pablo Nerudo, resurrected themselves in my being like a long forgotten truth from a recovered dream.

Indeed! 

This magnificient animal, washed up like useless flotsam on this deserted beach, is a survivor of our evolutionary past, the primal beast who lives in us all. Tragically, no longer able to hunt down a nourishing, flesh and blood meal, Lion is starving, wasting away in our abstracted modern world of empty words and images, a world of illusion directed by the greatest puppeteers to come along since god was worshipped: technology and the invisible hand of the marketplace.

* Excerpt from The Lion by Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems, p. 412