Rooted
"I promised myself I wouldn't write songs of an empire's end..."
Author note: This post was originally published on Medium in The Interstitial publication. I recommend any of the many stories and poems there. ... They’ve laid our way in lessons, multifarious, in being hated. Standing in the rubble of one nation, playing god, roots creeping in at us from those mahogany rooms, crafting claims to strip us bare. Here, we shrink, deflating on scattered straw. We’ve wasted time and love on these figureheads, made an identity by waving their flags into austere air that has ceased to blow. Our sunken eyes say it: We have thrown so many stones that we’re blinded just in time for Earth’s turn, and by design. The powerful already don brown, while we’re standing in the detritus, the blood of others. If it doesn’t affect us, we still lay the table on this foundation and feast; We, the gluttons — at once cannibals and fatted lambs, Bloated we stand, with soiled feet only a flood can clean. Let’s find something we can do while all this is being done to us. For now, I conquer the floors — witchcraft on treated wood and linoleum. Can we will away these years by wringing, by polishing, while pretending the center can hold as the bottom drops out? I promised myself I wouldn’t write songs of an empire’s end, yet here we are, cleaning before the schism for our sanity, finding the places too low for them to see, too aloft for them to touch. © Maggie McCombs 2024. All Rights Reserved.