POEM: ROYALTIES

 

 

 

 

Royalties

No more forelocks duly tugged.

No more doffed hats, deference mugged.

No soft-kissed rings, no begging bowls.

No more our future’s treasures stole.

 

Damn them all! Damn the fire and flint; 

the stones marked with ochre and blood; 

the stream-side footprints baked in the sun; the round, ivory bellies of old-Easter births;

the wild boar’s carved tusk stained with new blood.

Damn the palm-shaded mud walls with their wells of cool water

and meadows of green shoots. And damn forever those clay tablets.

Damn the stepped-roof vistas; the pyramids, the monoliths with their earthy circles; 

the humped barrows and zodiacal rows—those newly-shaped stones and their bloody sacrifices.

Damn the green fields and brown smoke wafting up

from the round, stone ovens.

Damn days of iron and clan and tribal steel. Damn the horse riders

with their maps dividing and discovering the world.

Damn also those dowsers of water and ley.

Damn the first towns, their walls and towers,

the roads between them. Damn the bridges, the levies and sewers,

the course of shaped waters. And damn the hands that shaped them.

 

Damn the course of battles—onwards from Ur, Kish and Babylon.

Damn their once-proud rivers—the Tigris and Euphrates;

the Indus, the flooding Nile and Yangtze, the black Rhine and Volga,

the red Tiber, the muted, brown-flecked Thames and Mississippi. Damn their delta soils and bedrock, their dredged channels and quays.

Damn the bones and stones and arrows; the sharp spears and swords;

the bombs, the cannons, the siege machines. Damn the chariots

and warships, the wars of blood and sacrifice; the death of lives and hopes.

Damn the rising and falling, and rising again. Damn the victories and defeats. And damn the remembering—the puzzling through it all.

Damn the lust for change and those who record it.

 

Damn the great conflagrations (and near conflagrations),

and one that yet may be—the one that will hold us all to account,

the one before which we will all tug our forelocks.

Damn all our sacrifice. And our debts.

 

Damn the grassy plains where timid sapiens first stood

gauging bright horizons. Damn the green forests

that once held our screeching monkey-cousins.

Damn the fire-keepers, the gatherers and builders.

            And damn the story-tellers. Damn them most of all.

 

I DON'T KNOW IF I LIKE THIS ONE. I wanted a poem for Remembrance Day and dug around and found this angry bit in the muck of some ancient or future battlefield. Its powder is still dry, so watch out!

 Cheers, Jake.