Kneel Until Your Knees Bleed: a Fable.

Ritterbusch, Dale

 Kneel Until Your Knees Bleed: a Fable
    Diodorus records a paradigm shift
   of some importance, no importance really
   if you were a person of little consequence,
   a poet perhaps, but if a king your life
   would be longer and more prosperous. Ergamanes,
   King of Nubia, disdained the divine recall
   of the gods, refusing as was custom
   to take his own life when issued
   a nullification decree by priests of the highest
   standing, those few allowed to enter
   the inner sanctum of the temple, their holy
   of holies, practicing the daily rite of water
   worship and sacrifice to the sun, given
   the word of god that the king, his time,
   his reign, finished on this earth, must
   dispatch himself and give way to the next,
   a sycophantic heir favored thus by god.
   Ergamanes, risen from his marriage bed,
   a brace of wives content to a point of satiation,
   feels no compunction to obey the priestly
   emissaries at his door. He declaims his
   god's command, assembles an army
   by mid-day and rides to the forbidden place,
   the golden temple, and slaughters all
   the priests, both high and low; their marrow
   yields to sand. You would likely do the same:
   the golden calf or lamb pulled down
   and turned to trinkets, statues pummeled
   to powder and shard, columns pulled
   apart and down, and the whole place
   burned. Now a king shall live
   forever and the poet's word,
   the historian's hand, burn with obsequy
   long and long and long into the night. 

DALE RITTERBUSCH is the author of Lessons Learned: Poetry of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath and Far From the Temple of Heaven. He twice served as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English & Fine Arts at the United States Air Force Academy.