The Massacre One Morning Of The Ancestors

We arrive on our spaceships
Highest of hopes and good intentions
We plant our gardens vast and green
Harvest our grapes and olives and corn
We build our cities tall and white
Stretch out the road, through land and space
Pointing -- "Hark, the promise of it!"

The monuments we raise, tempting fate,
We scrawl our names over them,
Condemning ourselves.

Here comes the army now
The angry, quill and brush wielding legions
Remembering us hateful, our own children
They paint our gardens and cities and roads
with their ever-growing palettes of words and colors,
But we recognize none of it.
Were not our sylvan-scapes pleasing?
Were not our Babylons and Romes pleasing?
Were they not the fruit of honest toil and imaginations as bright as any's?
Were not our hopes and intentions high and good?

I am old now, I am your mother and father
Baffled by your condemnation
Head on the chopping block, but
Was I not yesterday a promise, a hero?

Go and see!:
My name,
the now-ashen monument, still standing, if bowed and melancholy, in the center of town
bears it!

Alas, and at that, the ax falls:
"It is your fault, these miseries: these ill-conceived cities, these poorly managed gardens, these inefficient roads. One must pay for errors in judgement and deficiencies in information."

It's a bloodbath to make Robespierre blush --
The baby-faced victors, they arrogantly brandish their advantages, youth and no damned Congressional Record.
To be something other than the tormented practitioner, living in the gray,
Was not our lot.
God forgive us for our ignorance, we suppose, but
We stand proudly by our lives --
Even as we damaged, we repaired
And even as we destroyed, we created,
Which is the story of our race, the young ones will soon see.
- - -
Ah! How can I?
Defame the wombs and truncate the loins
Of teachers, explorers, innovators, and artists?
How can I bear their shamed confusion as they are led to slaughter,
the Old Guards, which were, one must remember, at one moment, the New Guards?

"Did I not yearn and strive," they ask me,
"Much as you. Did I not ponder stars and with a butterfly net, chase them, much as you?
Did I not encounter puzzles in new places, puzzles without a key, that I struggled to answer, but likely failed to understand, much as you?"

As they set to us these questions,
Which we answer with silent, stony piety and a finger toward the history books, the verdict,
Our own children look on.

They are sharpening their pencils and wetting their brushes,
Already conspiring against us and our endeavors.
They know, as we knew, that the battle has already been taken.
They will prevail.
With their vigor and technologies from on high and lessons learnt at a tender age from our own missteps,
They will prevail.

Reservoir

With every lash
(And there were many:
There were the raspberry stripes due her,
But also those she bore for the temptresses, ingenues, and bitches
To whom she had given agency)
With every one
It seemed like she was opened,
Stretched a little further
On the medieval machine.
Given the ability to feel more and more
And overwhelmingly more.

Now she has this great reservoir in her chest,
Poorly supported by loose flesh,
Of surplus emotion --
Emotions that don't even belong to her! --
And she is terrified
Of the person who will
Come and with his dynamite kisses
Fell the great wall
And be her ruin
Loosing the flood,
Drowning the voice of her better judgment
That has labored for so long buttress the vulgar dam
(But her dam, nonetheless).
Some call it bounty
But she's afraid of it --
Afraid of a crack, rumble, and spontaneous dissolution
Of many moons of blood, sweat, and tears
Wrought by the hand of someone who may
Or may not be aware
Of the power of his touch.

Map-makers

Map-makers
Charting the stars,
The mountains and oceans
The movements of our ancestors and ourselves.

Likewise, color-coding our bodies,
Our temples,
Graphing the subtle clicks and turns of our hearts
And testing for the tripwires of our minds.

Extracting meaning from the random,
Creating coherency from absurdity.
Measured music; balanced portraits;
Exposition, Mounting Action, Climax, Resolution.
Formulas and chronologies,
Created in frustrated attempt to understand ourselves.

All the while, trying to accept
The futility of our endeavors
To conquer the unknowable.
Trying to find a way
To love ourselves and love eachother
Because
(rather than 'in spite')
Of our limitations,
And our potential --
Who knows which of the two is more difficult to live with?