This is called "A Lesser God."
I don't think I got the beginning right, yet,
but I like some of the rest of it.
"A Lesser God."
In my old backyard, a 200-year-old stone wall
separates what once was a farm from what once was forest.
And in a limestone ossuary outside Jerusalem
a 2000-year-old wall separates what
once were the living from what always are the dead.
Mesopotamia, here at the crossroads of the world,
our guide walks the ruined perimeter
of a wall 5,000 years old, and reads from a book.
Deep in the sand like eons of layers.
Fortresses built upon ruins of fortresses,
and mud palaces, and plazas, and temples
with altars stained with blood.
"Here lay the greatest cities of the ancients,"
he recites, and points to a scattering of stones.
He shrugs, this custodian of time and sand.
"Was it plague?
Barbarian invasion?
Smugness of long aristocracy?
Maybe the silk route followed the river,
and the river was subject to a different god from man's."
He shrugs again.
I'm a poet.
Which way to the booksellers market?
And how were strangers treated in this place?
I'm a Jew.
Where did the 10 men assemble to read
from the one book and dispute?
"Your people worshipped other gods back then."
What about the little guys?
The slave who carried water and the slave who buried the dead.
How did they fare here?
"The city had 100 gates," he says.
"One was for the water carriers."
I stray.
I walk around.
I look to the stones and implore them,
"I'd like, please, to speak with a local god.
A lesser one would do just fine."
A stone says, "Consider me.
Though only a humbled shard at your feet, I once was a god--
two-headed lord of feast and famine.
I lived in a temple lit by the moon's motions and the stars.
Attended by priests from the seven Fates,
and famed astrologers, deviners, and the aged,
blue-skin, nomad, weather watchers.
You, poet, look to thyself.
You celebrate the little man--
his troubles, his joys.
Can you make from him a cosmology,
as I once did of the elements?
Back when feasts led to our downfall,
famine led us across the desert for 100 years
to found another city that lasted a millennium.
Now it, too, lies underground, though no less storied.
You stand on a volume of sand surrounded by volumes of sand,
and want to know how the little man fared.
Ask me a better question than that."