If I were an emblem, what would I be emblematic of?
I find this a tricky question to answer.

My first response would be: defence.
I was a defender, a city defender,
defending Cardiff from cholera.

Before entering the port, ships were stopped and boarded by health inspectors.
If anyone displayed cholera symptoms, they were brought to me,
to be nursed within these steadfast, once pristine walls.

Some would recover, others wouldn’t,
but the disease was contained,
the city protected from a devestating outbreak.

That’s one response: the self-important, grandiose response.

But, if I take a long, honest look at myself
(the sheer dilapidated state of me),
am I not emblematic of suffering?

Are my walls not drenched in pain:
relentless retching, merciless diarrhoea,
desperate, quarantine prayers
whispered in far-flung tongues,
and the eerie groans of the dying?

And beyond suffering, am I not a testament to human vulnerability?
Cholera has not disappeared:
wherever there’s abject poverty and poor sanitation, it thrives.

Maybe see me as an emblem of precariousness, your precariousness.
Yes, I am history,
but, in an unpredictable world,
I’m also current,
and future.