Hexagrams of the Everpresents

The Four Horsemen are long boren

in our minds;

As are Armageddon, hell fire and,

the myths of creation.

The sages, seers and, the wise

have seen beyond it in Time;

Yugas, flowering and dissolving.

Hammurabi's and Ashoka's realms

have long been dissolved.

Sumer's wisdom and bounty has been

trampled by nomads of Akkad.

The Old Kingdom has fallen;

the land is torn asunder.

Jericho and Canaan fall slaughter

to a peoples of the hills.

The harvest is bountiful but,

the Yangtze flows with blood.

Babylon has risen and fallen;

the Persians are ascendant,

Athens burned and the Indus crossed.

Tyre is put to the sword and

Persepolis levelled in Grecian wrath.

Romulus has slain Remus.

Carthage is salted into posterity,

its walls and people no more.

The Visigoths have pillaged Rome;

the light of the West

wanes to extinguish in bleak darkness.

Alexandria is fallen to a greed

and might of god and minion;

scrolls of wisdom and walls in ruin.

Kings and cardinals light

candles in an age of superstition,

ruin and, darkness.

Serfdom is plundered by Norsemen;

monasteries of books burned.

The Mongol hordes ravage China and

consume in blood, Eurasia.

The Black Death has reached London;

bodies churn in the Tiber.

Constantinople is sacked and fallen

to the greed held forth

in the glory of one man's word.

The gates of Vienna are

assailed by green of a crescent moon.

The Hundred Years' War eviscerates

the chivalry of Europe.

The victory of Iberian Christendom

births the Inquisition,

the right of a cleansing God and,

the decimation and pillage

of an Americas greedily devoured

for gold and catechism.

The Thirty Years' War defines for

centuries to come,

brutality, intracine slaughter,

famine and, intolerance.

The Seven Years' War, five continents

spanned, and with it too,

America's First Nations decimated

as pawns on a board.

There is the Terror of Robespierre;

blood on guillotines of France.

Europe smokes in cannon and carnage;

the order of Napoleon

has run amuck in egomaniac hecatomb.

Zulu impi, fierce asagi armed have

fallen upon their neighbors.

Manifest Destiny is the light of

a people afoot on new life

built on extinction by the civilized,

fittest and best armed.

A nation divided: Manassas, Antietam,

Shiloh, Vicksburg, Gettysburg.

The trenches are filled with the dying

and dead from Ypres to Verdun.

Ottoman Turks cleanse and annihilate

culture of ancient Armenia;

blood of genocide is in the millions

and the world scarcely cares.

Nanking is a burning torch of China.

Warsaw has fallen and

Auschwitz bellows its smoke in infamy.

Indochina is returned to the French;

the seeds of Diem are planted.

Pol Pot's legacy of inhumanity leaves

rotting the bones of millions.

Rwanda and Serbia echo gunfire and

the marauding cry for blood.

Fascism is on the rise in America:

and, the Sahel under siege

as ISIL and Al-Qaeda metastasize.

We hide from our dreaded coronavirus

while counting numbers with

fear on our abacus of the internet;

playing our part in a history

of typhoid, dysentery, leprosy, malaria,

polio, yellow fever, tuberculosis,

plague, cholera; and, smallpox which

it on its own, consumed more

flesh than all the atrocities of man.

'These are the best of times;

these are the worst of times.'

It is no longer as it was.

We can only yearn for the past.

(23 April '20)