Rachael Mead # 8, The photographer and the wrong art

The photographer and the wrong art

State Library of South Australia

I see them every morning, she said.

They wait outside the glass doors

no-one meeting eyes

a ragged line that shuffles

into a clot of bodies

as 10am ticks closer.

They remind me so much of cows, she said

on the dairy where I grew up.

At dusk they’d stroll out of the paddock

dazed with  sunshine and meadow grass

and shamble into loose formation,

waiting their turn at the machines.

But I just can’t capture it, she said.

I can’t find a way to show their herdness

in an image. She shook her head,

non-plussed at this wilful failure,

shutter speeds and apertures

clicking briskly in her mind.

I pick up my pen.