Kids always think things will happen
Too fast. Then by middle age
One catches the real speed of things,
The pace of history, the slope of the sine—
Nothing is quick; and yet, it moves.
To mark a four-decade tangent—
Now from ‘84,
A student at the English School
In Nicosia, Cyprus,
Eleven, proconsul’s brat,
Deeply saddened by the shocking defeat
Of Walter Mondale—I would say
Now in Ethiopia, there is a war
That no one cares about. That is new;
That is no ‘84—
Most of its sparks self-smothered
As if we had aged along with me,
Mellower, more absent and more frayed,
More certain of our adolescent error,
Fatter, wiser, more averse to change,
More comfortable letting things slide.
The paper gets thinner and thinner; whole
Countries, like Ethiopia, go forgot.
Live Aid, where art thou now?
Bob Geldof and the Boomtown Rats—
“Sir Bob, the Man of Peace”—
Mais où sont les neiges d'antan—
All those fair causes of the Eighties?
They faded, like worn bandannas;
We remember them, without passion,
Old girlfriends in the beverage aisle,
Gnawed and swelled by crabby time…
Now it is ‘22; for some
Cursed reason, I sit in some dump
Of a hotel in San Juan
In covid, “uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire,” framed
By our rotten empire. The blue,
Uninfected sea is mocking me.
The humid air is entirely perfect.
We have everything. We need nothing.
We have nothing. We mean nothing.
Everything crumbling and expensive,
Everything infected with everything else—
And yet the slope of the wave is not
What you think, young man; I hear
Burke, the young MP,
Really a sort of Georgian nerd,
Dressed in two hundred pounds,
Waistcoat round his pimple pride—
“The nation is ruined? Why, sir—
There is a lot of ruin in a nation.” True.
How many have admired the waves
On the beach of a sinking province—
My phone doesn’t even work here lol—
And thought: thalassa, thalassa,
The tune of Pan, the beaten drum,
The end of some endless anabasis,
Coda of some imperial melody—
This is hope, my son. Hope will kill you
Sure and slow as smoking. Sorry.
No empire counts its years,
Or even just decades—
Look at the Assyrians, meted
By millennia—who ever lived
That long? And the bigger the thing,
The longer-lived… a lot of ruin…
Only now in the British Museum.
Our kids’ kids will surf this same
Slope—rockier, rockier, rockier—
They will not see; they will live
In wire, with dogs, with a button
Which calls one gang to quell another—
They will find that completely normal.
It will be normal; at the end, said Taine,
“Everyone thinks he is well governed
If he himself is not being killed.”
Now I, in this post of prophet,
Humbled for the year, widowered
In spring by God, scorched in fall
By witchy women’s dragon burn,
The firework din from out below
“Like the fall of Kabul, but with salsa”—
Leaning on the rusted railing
Of this mildew penthouse
On a shedding horn of empire,
This crusted dream of Teddy R—
I feel very close to everything.
I tell you, not hesitating at all,
Resounding from the vatic spleen,
Booming on the imam’s bullhorn,
Preached in Rome and Jerusalem:
Tomorrow will be a long way down.
You really shouldn’t wait for it.