Zamani, 24 November 2017

Long time ago, after the ghosts had gone
For good, the lack of resurrection was
The beginning of forgiveness. It’s not true
That anyone could separate forgive and forget.
The one presupposed the other, in humans
Anyway. Bones excavated in Eastern Europe
That had nothing to do with remembered
Atrocities or historical wars, bones that were
Five thousand years old at least, bore traces
Of the Plague, suggesting that the nomads
Who shouldered in off the steppes cleared
Demographic meadows for their descendants
With the mindless aid of the very same miseries
That had driven them away from home
In the first place, the same murderous pests,
A prequel in a sense to the smallpox blankets
And the waves of parasitic decimation
Much later Europeans would unleash
In the Americas to devastating effect. But who
Curses those bones for curses they carried?
It’s like that. There are actually many stages,
And dying from living memory is just the first,
In a species that keeps grievance records.
There’s the passing away of history, which
Can take hundreds of years before beginning
To exhaust itself and fade into amoral anecdote
After a millennium or two. There’s the passing
Of ethnies, religions, and languages, which
Dissolve the bonds of resentment as they sink.
There’s the passing of prehistory, and then,
Earlier, of the other, competing subspecies, which
Had made it harder to feel lonely while they were
Still remembered, a gap that remains a depression
In the hollows of many folk stories concerning
Lost races of little people, trolls and such,
Mostly caught under the ground. Out and out,
Further and further towards no memory at all,
Not even false, and then it’s nothing but
Forgiveness and speculations about beginnings
Near the end. Significance recedes asymptotically
And, along with it, pride and blame. Zamani. The same.