What Inscription Means Now

What Inscription Means Now
A Meditation on Heritage, Silence, and the Unprotected Wild

They wrote it in gold letters: Outstanding Universal Value.

On South Africa's Cape Peninsula-a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a protected landscape of ancient fynbos and impossible beauty-baboons are being erased.

Chased from dawn to dusk by paintball-wielding monitors. Shot in roosting sites and on the mountain that is meant to be their home. Buried in unmarked graves. Scheduled for enclosures euphemistically called "sanctuaries," with euthanasia protocols built into the fine print.

And those who object are told: speak, and we take the better option away.

This prose poem is a refusal of that silence.
It is a cartography of the lost-the dispersing males who crossed invisible lines, the troops buried in soft sand, the euthanised whose deaths are spoken of only in passive voice. It is a meditation on what heritage means when protection can be revoked the moment it becomes inconvenient. It is an act of witness when all democratic channels have emptied into bureaucratic sand.

What does aversion teach when there is nowhere left to go?

For the baboons still running through a home that no longer answers when they ask where they can be. For those who cannot stay silent. For those who keep records. For those who grieve. For what inscription should have meant.

This happened/is happening. It has a name. Look.

Image courtesy of: Robert Sachowski on Unsplash
Cover created with the assistance of Canva.com