We change the river’s name to make it ours.
We wall the city off and call it fate.
We husband our estate of ash,
For what we have we hold, and this
Is what is meant by history.
We have no love for one another, only uses
We can make of the defeated.
— And meanwhile you have disappeared
Like smoke across a frozen field.
What language? You had no language.
Stirring bone soup with a bone, we sip
From the cup of the skull. This is culture.
All we want to do is live forever,
To which end we make you bow down to our gods
In the midday square’s Apollonian light
Before we ship you to the furnaces
And sow you in the fields like salt.
We fear that the fields of blue air at the world’s end
Will be the only court we face.
We fear that when we reach the gate alone
There will be neither words nor deeds
To answer with. Therefore, we say, let us
Speak not of murder but of sacrifice,
And out of sacrifice make duty,
And out of duty love,
Whose name, in our language, means death.
Copyright © 2011 by Sean O'Brien, November, Picador Poetry