Goodbye Napoleon, please look away,
and cover your eyes,
and be saved,
from your studded bridle,
so your white carriage,
can give way so the shiny new
electric carts can take your spot.
Carts have no worries,
no need for rights, no plumed bridles
or old blankets.
Soon you will be saved from work,
but not from the good intentions of human beings,
who love righteousness and judgement,
but are murders of romance.
Napoleon, can you say a last goodbye
to the eager people,
to the lovers and visitors,
who have always loved to ride behind you,
to hold hands and see the magic
in their children’s eyes?
Will you miss the gentle
tingle of your bells,
echoing
through the park?
They mean for you to be gone, these soulless
people, who say the modern world is no place for you,
is too crowded and dangerous for you,
but they will keep the trucks that make it so,
and exile you, so you can wither and die
in safety in your no-kill preserve.
For what is a working horse to do
when his work is to be pitied and preserved,
but die?
No one will ever hear your big hooves clop-clopping
on the cobblestones of a great park,
or see the sun flash off of your studded bridle,
replaced by the trucks
and the whine of the electric carts.
Napoleon, you can grow old in silence
and uselessness,
and safety.
You will be saved from pride,
and purpose,
and admiration now.
You have rights now,
you are saved,
you can vanish from our world,
from a real life of work and risk, from the life of horses,
that horses have lived among people
for thousands of years,
pulled carts and humans in crowded places,
in all weather, in streets lined with mud and manure.
You will have no use for your
studded bridle now, on your rescue
farm, where you will have the right
to be piteous and dependent and without purpose.
No need to ever preen and strut again,
to pose for the camera.
Just leave your studded bridle there,
where you stand,
a memory of you.
The moon over the park covers her eyes,
with both hands,
and can’t bear to look.