A cabin that had once been white
Stood, peeled, on the shore of Carthage.
It looked like a drunken scarfaced knight -
Eyes shut to Dionysian carnage.
A pack of lost dogs roamed around it,
Their pangs of want they sought to manage.
The lone cabin stood on the wrinkled sand
Like a young tree on Shott el Jerid's* white pale
Whom the white monster forced to speak with the hand:
“Basta, no stubborn resistance from me will avail.”
The fuming sun displayed his festival of fear
Over dogs who could handle their thirst no more;
While the salt has now made its white task clear:
Gnawing the sapling and gnawing evermore
Until the only mark on the Shott will disappear.
And the poet who has only half-chosen the vision
Half not knowing what to do, tried to listen
To the trickle of his obstinate, patient cheer
Oozing through the new orange laptop,
He had purchased from a Chinese peer.
(c) LazharBouazzi, August 10, 2016.
“*Shott el Jerid” is the largest salt lake in Tunisia and the Sahara desert, with a surface area of 7OOO km2. As far as the poem is concerned it would perhaps be helpful to say that the gigantic dry salt pan has the shape of a wolf.