The Little Walls Before China

A courtier speaks to Ch’in Shih-huang-ti, ca. 210 B.C.

Highness, the former walls were helpless. They

stood alone in the middle of small fields

protecting nothing. A single peasant’s holding

engulfed each one as it ran briefly, straight

from noplace off to noplace, with ruinous steps

of broken stone at both ends. Only head-high,

without the towers, gates and towns of your great wall,

they stuck where they were, never rising over hills

or curving through valleys: nothing but shoddy masonry

and a mystery: who built them, how long ago,

what for? They seemed to have no role but balking

the reaper and the ox; their bases made

islands in the flashing scythe-strokes, where wild flowers

and shrubs sprouted.

So all the people praise you

for burying such walls and their memory

in your vast one, which joins them, stretching far

beyond where they once crumbled to hold your Empire:

a wall which therefore can never have an end

but has to go on extending itself forever.

How useful, how cogent your wall is: a pale

for the civilized, a dike against the wild people

outside, who trade their quiet human blood

for the rage of gods, tearing men to pieces,

throwing them, watching them fall. In burying

those little walls, Lord, you have covered our shame

at our ancestors, best forgotten, whose mighty works

were so pointless, or so pitiably useless.

Was all their effort so that daisies could grow in fissures?

So that some human work would rise over the flats

and weather till it seemed not human? Only

so that something of ours could be like trees and rocks:

docile-seeming, yet sullenly opposed

to use, and when compelled, only half serving,

reserving from the functions that we give them

a secret and idle self. The peasants would make

lean-tos for cattle against those walls: they served

for this alone.

Now scholars, Lord, are saying

the gods are not bulls and cows. That in ancient times

we herded these animals to keep from starving

and going naked, and so came the old custom

of thinking them gods—from dependence. In my youth,

I know, the peasants said just the opposite.

Worship came first. The awesome bull and cow

were gathered to be adored more easily,

till people noticed how they let themselves

be driven and penned. Next came the first murders

against these gods, and the careful observation

that they stood to be killed. And so their cult became

contempt of beings that would live with us

and submit to our crimes and hunger, and we began

to breed them. That is why, the farmer says,

cattle are honoured, murdered, eaten, cherished

with labour that makes him their slave, and that is why

in summer he exults in blood, but shivers with fear,

with exhausted terror and regret, and sinks into

stunned revelry all winter, eating the salted meat,

getting children, his house closed up with snow,

himself awake as if he slept, living

as if he had already died, and rich, happy

as if he were a buried worm.

Is God,

then, Highness, the fat flaccidity of cattle?

Myself, I don’t like to wonder anymore.

I only hope lifelong service earns what I ask:

the command of some far bastion on your wall

where it curves out into the unsettled wastes

beyond any field, and the barrenness inside

is indistinguishable from that without.

This is the reward and end of life I want:

to be a point, though infinitely small

and far from you, in that wide circle centred

on your great self. I see myself arriving

to take charge of my troops. I look down from the tower:

bare plains, outcrops of ice and rock, vast restless

stirrings of grey grasses and dark-veined overcast,

the cold wind’s hissing. Year after year the same,

waiting for an assault that never comes,

straining to glimpse our naked enemies

creeping blended with their stony soil: nothing

but legend, it may be. Maybe a morning

will rise when, waking, I find that I’ve forgotten

which way is north, and can’t tell if I am turned

outward to danger or inward, Highness, to you.

The sun invisible, a murky light diffused

throughout featureless cloud, and the wall so long

no curve appears—it seems to stretch out straight

endlessly east and west: what clue will there be

which way to face my people for the attack?

It will be crucial then to show no doubt.

My orders, I vow, though ignorant, will be crisp.

Source: Rest on the Flight into Egypt (Brick Books, 1999)