MY EMPIRE
My empire made me
happy because it was an empire
and mine.
I was too stupid to rage at anything.
Babies cried at birth, it was said,
because the devil pricked them as introduction
to knowledge.
I sat fingering my gilded frame, counting
grievances like toes:
here my mother, here my ring,
here my sex, and here my king.
All still there. Wrath is the desire
to repay what you’ve suffered.
Kneeling on coins
before the minor deity in the mirror.
Clueless as a pearl.
That the prophets arrived not to ease our suffering
but to experience it seems—can I say this?—
a waste?
My empire made me happy
so I loved, easily, its citizens—such loving
a kind of birth, an introduction to pain.
Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it.
The new missiles can detect a fly’s heartbeat
atop a pile of rubble from six thousand miles away.
That flies have hearts, one hundred and four cells big, that beat.
And because of this knowing:
a pile of rubble.
The prophets came to participate in suffering
as if to an amusement park, which makes
our suffering the main attraction.
In our brochure:
a father’s grief over his dead father,
the thorn broken off in a hand.
My empire made me happy
because it was an empire, cruel,
and the suffering wasn’t my own.
(Kaveh Akbar)
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He’s so amazing ❤️