Even Empires Down

 Here's a piece I wrote for my crew, Dancers Without Borders. We choreographed a dance to a recording of this poem in spring 2005.

Even Empires Down

Shhh…Can you hear it?

Something buried is rumbling

Something brittle is beginning to break

No matter the clever clutchings of attachment

A sinister myth, pridefully perched

Is finally falling under its own weight

Gravity must love even empires down

Her pulling is nameless

She doesn’t know words like evil

Or greed or separate

She cannot help but answer precisely

To the weight of neglect

The drilling, driving, scurrying, scraping

Of disconnect.

Shhh…Can you see it?

Her ice melting

Her oceans rising

The inevitable capsizing of an era

Is nothing compared to her boundaryless, watery embrace.

Fear is not as blind as we think

But is near-sighted

It makes up small stories

Obsesessed with the microscopic

Absorbed by the minutia

While ancestors of the millennia dance alone

We look away from the swelling tide.

Open wide…can you taste it?

Cold metal between your lips

(The centuries grumble with boredom and distaste, "Aren't you done with that yet?")

Genocides past are not so silent

The soil and rock never forget

Guns and crosses and blood

Time is a silent scream…

If you could hear it, you would cover your ears.

But now, thinly-veiled masks are peeling back.

Some will do everything to hang on to the lie

They will create media mazes and monsters

And try to bring it on

Saying that God will come

And carry them up

They will stop recycling

Delight in wars

And believe they are saved.

She smiles patiently at all of this desperate, hideous hiding

She whispers urgently to those awakening from the dream

Shhh…can you feel it?

Out of the debris something naked and raw is stirring

Something beating has always been there

Something breathing still stands

And courageously awaits the change.