Laura Hinton

Trajan’s Column

Excerpt from “A Little Book of Human Violence,” Part III: Elegy & Empire

Just take the land

Just take the land and the seaports

Just take the land and the people on scared land and scummy water

Just burn the battered temples and holy ground

Just ruin the people’s homes and their civic complexities

Just rob the people of what builds and sustains their civilization

Just poison their soils and butcher their farm animals

Just rape the young women hiding in shelters among the people

then beat the old women and enslave all children

Just kill them all

or send a few of them fleeing

make them become other people on other lands

so they will die of poverty and disease

Just bomb their infrastructure their administrative ordinances and statistics

Just bomb those who would assist the people or prevent genocide

Just command your troops to leave no flesh unsullied

Just order them to send fireballs in the air to blow apart the cosmos

Just insist they break apart every edifice of reason or humility

Just empty all schools of learning and of thought

Just shatter the hospitals of care

Just take away the right to speak or protest what you are doing

Just label any protesters “criminals” or “troublemakers” and throw them out of jobs, universities, and all social institutions

Just make sure your military torches the last libraries and universities

Just make sure no traces of a literary or language tradition lives on hidden in a hole

Just destroy the possibility of alternative histories, all expressions not your own

Just rob the youth of youth, of futures of seasons

Take their breath away take their health away

Take their families away and their apparatus of self-governance away

Take their joy away and the shells of comforting ritual form away

Take the bodies away and throw them into dusty heaps away 

Blast the children away with guns and ammunition

Prevent children from growing, thriving, and bearing new children

            Take the future away

 Incarcerate forever any survivors for your perverse pleasure

Block their rights to access

because entrances and exits might create new resources

Taint the water and salt the distribution pipes

Lace farm beds with arsenic or mercury or other toxic chemicals

Turn bricks into black-soot shattered rectangles to leach the clay

Bomb bridges and roadways blocking all avenues of travel and movement

Turn off the power and them to go this way and that in the dark

On shattered roadways

Shoot the resistors at short range on their own mattresses

  in front of their family and friends

 Shoot them in the nude in the head several times

  or, before you shoot them, strip them of their garments and protective coverings

Make them stand naked before you as they submit to you before dying

Make them cower before you so they will hate you in their dead prayers

They say their prayers           

  to different gods

They die

  to a different hell

                                                one you try to fashion

Shoot them up in groups in open fields or in lineups against a wall

Bury their imaginations with the rotten corpses of sorrow and hatred

Be satisfied you are better than these other people you have murdered and pillages

Be sure to diminish those who disagree with your actions over the years

Be the one to blame and chastise others’ humanity not yours

Be the one to advertise that those you name as “Enemy” is inconceivable and must be damned

In your much richer concrete landmines of wealth

In the blessings of your many military machines

  your steely product yields

  your GNP capitalism

  in your standards of arrogance

Say that  “war crimes” are but necessary defensive actions

Maintain and speed along the forests growing

just to bend tree branches around your city gate

the blue-sky yielding your viewpoint godly-precious

the clocks ticking through your star-lit spun dark galaxy

the sulfur produced by you and sent by your winds of proprietary change

Raze the other peoples’ capitols

Bury their skulls and let the sun bleach them white

Burn the lost stones into bits for fodder

Butcher the animals and lacerate the crops

  to eat, to own, or abandon—your choice

Plunder the treasuries and save any waste for your spoils

Cart away metals and minerals to enhance your social economy

Fill your coffers with a ruined wreckage that you cannot control

Be the “control” you can only dream about in your fitful amber nights

Lie, cheat, and prey upon media that denounce your activities and motives

Defund the politicians and researchers who might discover other ideas

Don’t harbor feelings of injustice

Don’t tinker with doubt or ambivalence

Don’t rewrite this manual or let others worry

over the manure of your deeds

Conquer all forms of communication and knowledge

Stop all  analyses of your victory

Plug the sound of the drummer’s drum between your ears and brain

Decimate the voice of the enemy you invented

To ensure the erasure of records, do not read your own scholarship!

And now your humanity will blend in again with the weave of the blanket of your memory

And history will not interpret history for the books

And Carthage will never rise again except in the spiked altar of its oppressor

And Dacia will become another outpost of Empire where dictators host fancy drunken cocktail parties

And Gaza will be cleansed of its worn-out rubble

developed into a pricey Israeli beach resort for the elite class

when the forgetting completes the cycle of the waves

as the Mediterranean tides lap up the broken bones and body parts

as the sand silts away

as the red of the sunset dissolves into the sea bottom

to be featured on eco-tourism’s future postcard.

___

Dedicated to photographer Sarah Mortaja in Gaza, who last we heard from was living in a tent under bombardment, in what used to be her urban home, Gaza City.