by Evelyn A. So
Maybe you sailed off the map and lived to tell of plunder, battles at sea. I picture your climbs up the mast, the way you sang out land! Maybe I laughed when the glass showed the first barbarians straggle ashore, dark and red from the sun. How they reeked all under heaven…Would I double the incense and waft the sweet odor of smoke under the noses of my ancestors? I'd bow, black hair down my back, braided the way a civil servant wears it, and listen. Who wouldn't want to gaze upon our fabled shores? We have plenty of powder. What need have we for strangers or guns, germs or steel? Let's drink. The moon's up, and the rat that lives on her pocked surface won't bite through the string that binds earth and heaven for ten thousand years.
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