They’ve never stopped beating them with everything imaginable,
rendering them, hacking off heads that cure for years, ranked along

the bridges, aqueducts, cast-iron fences of the old city. Fresh-cut,
pickled, or burned to bone, those ghoulish, leather-winged Giants

now headless, those greasy, reeking barbarians whose phlegmy chatter
shrieks in civilized ears! More life in one Cossack encampment

than a hundred scriptoria, a thousand roller-coasters, ten thousand arias
& the first footstep on Mars. Consult the plagues of YHWH if you don’t

“believe” me (which I myself day-to-day mostly don’t, but isn’t that
cowardice?). Fed, watered, hopeless & free, troopers pin names

to their shirts so burial parties can notify kin. Railroad spike
through the tongue, barbed wire round the neck, the thrill of just

giving in. Consult Homer or the Reconquista for more of what
I haven’t done, would never do, could never conceive of doing—

not personally. You? You’re as fantastical as the driest fact.
Meat roasts, drink is drawn, bread browns in the horno,

dogs wrangle in the dust & three (I tabulated twice) urchins chase
a ball into a tent’s mouth. The sun—orange blotch through smoke—

hovers above the river. A raft bears twenty four-armed fighters
& ten armored ravens—how sublime to sing it!—to the far shore

as those who work all day pocket awls & pour bowls of milk.

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