Roots

What great unwritten knowledge lies
Collapsed under the cracked plates of your skull?—
Which piles, condensing all it’s ancient vapors
Into the milky corner of your eyes?

Have I with my civilization
Just now only come close to measuring
To your archive?— Diminished by age’s flame;
A scroll, dead language and a name,

For which a misused sound is no more an offense,
Is all that overcasts your stumped foundation.
My dearest friend in her archeological wisdom
Bequeathed me had with excavation, restoration and re-polish

Of great Colossus, but no mind the payment I
Cannot project your face on his weed-ridden bronze;
Perhaps, I don’t respect you for a pedestal
And perhaps only the illusion of a loss

From your collapse floats ghostly in the air,
Perhaps, perhaps no scripture on your duodenum
Could, rediscovered, rightwards across time propel me:
What is a tale but fakes to future generations?

Believe me, I have traveled far
To your warm-sanded, veining, broken ports
And kicked the ancient glass-blown vases into walls
In hopes of pointers. But maybe I should rather wait

Until too late — when science becomes obsolete?
Your Alexandria with ransacked taverns
Is beaten down by rain and centuries
Of cruelest winds: no memory remains.

Why should I trust your greatness now
When never have I once entrusted been with it?
Though I’ve had all vertebrae-mountain crests
In the basins of palms of my two hands

And clamors of the quarreling seas secure under my chin
I now might be too much like you…
And oh does the obscenely striking similarity
Bear only shallow resolutions? Is my skin

— Your stone? My eyes — your judgements? My
Voice — but the toil and scramble of your people?
Oh, my forgotten-world trade epicenter!—
I’m nothing like you.