on a day like this

On a day like this, a thousand years ago, when what was lost was still only half-formed, the sky was bright, everlasting, but the clouds were torn...

On a day like this, if you remember, the same drum-song of the heart played out in tense, expectant open fields. The cards lay upturned when it began, and kismet, like ink, stained their fingers, as faint-scents from the east clung to their gold-embroidered sleeves.

On a day like this there was nothing new to be said, the hours of the clocks full. Hasn't the sun woven its deep shadows into the grass, every August afternoon for tens of thousands of years, reminding us of the lateness of our lives on earth? 

Words rolled out to initiate with false grandeur the spilling of blood. Iron-souled words proclaimed with puffed-up chests. A man would look back and survey the ruins and wonder to himself: "what curse is this?"

And yet, before the last drop of blood has dried and the dark crows taken their pickings, nothing will be recalled and the fine deeds will seem as hollow and empty as the fields themselves at nightfall. The intensity of the afternoon broken, dust would, with time, intermingle amongst the dead, and no-one would know no-one. What rank has man on earth, sang the bards.

From the top of a hill an old god surveyed the disaster, the carnage, and thought, not unwisely: "two black dogs fighting for a bone".

What was solemn fades with the turning of a wrist, the raising of a palm. A thousand years and the dead dredge the Tigris. What is left,a  thousand years on: a shard of a poem, reconstructed in calmer times, a shred of a tapestry fabric, hung in a long, cool dark room in a museum, where a tourist-we tourists- will glance at it with indifference, but be reminded of our own deep past-which lives on today, in faraway places, on the pages of our newspapers, which stain our fingers...

And still, we place our coins on the table, glowing in our good fortune, unaware that we feed the death-machine and always have. Time's brushstroke on a white canvas draws us together in our homelessness. And there it marks us, makes a thousand years disappear like the glint of the summer on the river's surface; draws us, again and again, a broken circle.