Explanation:
The officer is supposed to find the criminal. That is (technically) his job. A detective does more in the searching part, though.
Also, a "lamb to the slaughter" means that some prey (lamb) is going to immediately get killed/ slaughtered. Assuming that the criminal is the "lamb" and the "killer" is the officer, the irony is that the officer can not kill the criminal. That the criminal isn't exactly the prey and isn't "sent out to die" .
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*I may or may not be right.*</em></u></h3>
Hello!
Your questions is incomplete. The complete poem is:
An Arab Shepherd Is Searching For His Goat On Mount Zion
An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion / and on the opposite hill I am searching for my little boy. / An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father / both in their temporary failure. / Our two voices met above / the Sultan’s Pool in the valley between us. / Neither of us wants the boy or the goat / to get caught in the wheels / of the “Chad Gadya” machine. / Afterward we found them among the bushes, / and our voices came back inside us / laughing and crying. / Searching for a goat or for a child has always been / the beginning of a new religion in these mountains.
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The whole text has cultural references. Mount Zion, by its use and historical significance, the "sultan's swimming pool", being a specific reference of an Arab culture and the Chad Gaya, for being a musical style. The Arab shepherd, however, enters more into the perspective of common sense, and could be seen, from an alternative perspective, as an emptiness of cultural meaning.
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a. the Arab shepherd</span>