A Historian

DANIEL HOFFMAN

DANIEL HOFFMAN

A HISTORIAN

The dead again

Burst from their levelled graves

They reassemble on the hill

Ready for disastrous victory

Where a great empire fell

On its foe and fell

Again in the hot wide

Landscape of his mind

The captains sit astride

Their festooned chomping horses send

Batallions into certain

Enfillade

O they can never

Change the outcome they have fought

This battle over

Never knowing

Why they are there

Still following

Tattered pennants ignorant

Of trade routes or the pride

Of prince or diplomat whose ruse

Charges them to ride

The bloodspecked foaming crest

Of this riptide

No more than he can know

The soldier's brute obedience to orders

The captain's fealty to the general's plan

The commanders wrapped in webbed illusion

That their strategy will follow

Their will

Nor know the iron taste of fear

In throats that do not seem a part

Of the same contraption as the legs

Wildly going their own way

Or the gut that retches at the smell of blood

Or the heart

Booming its dark cannonade

Until the heartbeat or the battle ends.

The tallying of losses starts again.

The sky thickens with buzzards' wings.

They settle, gorge, and circle, waiting for

The future