You People Will Have to Leave

To sit under a cottonwood

By the edge of the parking lot

Of Old Fort Boise Park and read,

In Parma, Idaho, of lost

Empires from the early eras

Of cities and standing armies—

Silence descended—is to want

To inflict an observation

About humans on the human

World that lives to make and misshape.

What does this frontier replica

Of a fort not two centuries

Old have to say in the shadow

Of phrases translated from times

When Ur’s city walls already

Counted millenniums backward

Through civilizations ancient

Enough to have changed their climate,

Salted their marshes, and so forth,

Already moved on to stages

Of grieving and lamentation—

Silence descended? People talk,

In a noisy era, about

Fresh decimation on its way,

But it’s hard to say, on a day

Like today in packed Idaho,

Industrial agriculture

Plugged into global supply chains,

Streets and parking lots rife with cars,

Trucks, pick-ups, rolling second homes,

A general sense of bustle,

Despite the rural surroundings,

What will this be after the end

Of all the systems that made it

Into the obstreperously

Patriotic, confident land

It is now? Will silence descend?

Will the gods right now contending

For believers and wealth vanish?

You read a little more, this time

About Hattusha and the Late

Bronze Age Collapse. You imagine

Your daughter and her friends grown old,

The survivors at least, leaving

The stagnant remains of small towns,

Or the smoking piles of ashed roofs,

Maybe on foot, as so many

Displaced people already move,

Only, by then, refugia

Like Parma, Idaho, will be

Themselves ruins from which to flee.

What do you want to say to them,

Writing from the end of your frail

And painful but sheltered lifespan

Lived within a kind of empire,

A land you never had to flee?

That history encourages

Us with evidence things come back,

Under new management, glory

Days starting again, for someone

If not them? That the Dark Ages

Of any given location

Are not only not forever,

But never as dark, on closer

Inspection, as people believed?

That some happiness seems to breathe,

Some ordinariness at least,

Through every archaeology

Of the people that had to leave?