Legacy of Empire

You were born, where? Into unemployment, uncertainty? Asking 
your God, how, why? They wooed you into camouflage and moulded 
you from the rawest material: there are Hollywood aspirations and 
shards of brutality embedded in your dreams.

Now you are here, gloating over my body, even as they are taking 
some of you home in body bags: delivering to your frightened 
nation its sons and daughters dressed up in draped coffins.

All the waste — not only the present, but the past and future.

When you leave you think you have left me behind. But you do not 
return alone. I am with you. We are chained together and now you 
must pull me with you, a part of the cradle of civilisation in 
your land of Princeton poets.

I will remain like the heavy drag of the wind, my heavy 
resistance dragging through the rooms of your homes, into your 
fields of grain; you will feel my weight along the valleys of 
your beloved country, in its whipped deserts.

This is your terrible legacy, that I am always with you, you who 
are a prisoner in your own land.

Tom Pearson