Ozymandias Replies
[An illustration from Frederik Ludvig Norden, Drawings of some ruins and colossal statues at Thebes in Egypt: with an account of the same in a letter to the Royal Society (1741)]
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So, friend, you think my face and legs in stone
Are signs that I have failed? Friend, think again.
When I ascended to my marble throne
The land was forest, meadow, lakeside glen.
I took it and I wasted it. This desert tract
Stands as my most expansive monument:
Dead-life, as blank as hope, as bald as fact.
I made a world of sand. And it's this spent
Stage-set, bleached clean, that I am proudest of—
More than my palaces and bling and war—
Because it's the perfection of my love
When my rule's push came to my people's shove.
We tyrants know what power's really for.
I made my desolation to endure.
El apático
(With thanks to Percy Bysshe Shelley)
I met a traveller from a future time
who said: two small and stunted hands of stone
lie in the desert, the fingers short and fine.
Half sunk, a weathered head, a sun-bleached dome,
the orange skin long faded to dilute piss,
is also there, the candyfloss hair all gone
save for a strand or two, the merest wisp.
Sat on the head is a Mexican, he smokes and yawns.
Look! You can see him on my screen.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Orangemandias, king of kings.
Look on my works, ye Mexicans, and despair!
I will build a great wall – and nobody
builds walls better than me, believe me.
I will build a great, great wall
on our southern border, and I will make
Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”
Nothing beside remains, not one stone
upon another, just cacti and miles of sand.
The Mexican takes a piss, then checks his phone.