Three Thousand Four Hundred and Two

Some believe there were many who resisted
who didn't support the final push
to ultimate conquest and death.
There are signs, they say,
like the pieces of fresco on the ruins of a building
at the western coast of the continent
most likely to have radiated
final criminal intent.
Female figures of different colors
can still be seen embracing and at work.

Discrete groupings called themselves countries,
spoke separate languages. On the eastern coast
of what some have called the southern land mass
at a place that may have been Port Happiness
in one of the tongues
most rapidly ceding to translation
there is evidence of a periodic gathering of peoples
a lingering energy our monitors classify
as continuing to pulse
through all the centuries of silence.

About a charred inscription, characters
as yet indecipherable,
we have conflicting interpretations.
Some experts from the patchwork continent
believe the marks mere ornament
while those from the land whose upper region
is an endless horizon of sand
claim they remember. They remember.
Yet theirs is a memory scorned
by those writing the Table of Official Proof.

Only the unnamable is repudiated by all-
ancient carnage, three-dimensional
remnant of a great death.
Men. Women. Children. A breaking apart,
destruction so deep and vast no language can hold it.
We speak around but not of it,
walk its circumference, allude or refer
only by describing what it was not.
How to avoid its repetition is the work of high priests
though clandestine sages have lately taken up the task.

Recently discovered sites yield documents
bearing the words we will not forget
and this must never be allowed to happen again
-perhaps referring to other disasters,
earlier moments
when harmony ripped open
beneath the weight of greed.
Some experts reject these findings
as incompatible with the terminal nature
of the main event.

Many who made it through The Fourth World
say we must join forces
in this struggle for survival.
A struggle, they say,
that demands we learn to control
earth air water
and other living beings,
harnessing these for the benefit of all.
They are busy developing and stockpiling
the weapons they say will keep us safe.

But a few believe it was just such domination
that led to the explosion,
the event which brought about
such poisonous atmosphere.
This divide between those who honor memory
and those who reject an element
invisible to the eye, unheard,
lacking in physical form or proof.
Those few who venture beyond the protective fences
will surely find the answer

or all will succumb beneath the weight
of reinvented wheels
trampling us under freshly turned earth.

--Margaret Randall Albuquerque, February 2003 On the threshold of war against Iraq