Blueprint. Pyramids

We stand before Pyramids

We stand beneath pyramids built of wires

Built of cargo ships and computation

Built of our venerated law and custom.

That heave from deserts, where the band plays on

Upon the wreckage of old certainties

Upon famished, unwashed, terrified pleas

On legal instruments, players play on.

Watching seasons of reflected sun

On the gold crowned apex, as at Cheops

When the Nile flooded with slave bodies

When the mind budded with new found signs

When Egyptians learned how to split one

Into fractions and built pyramids.

There is no gold atop the pyramids at Cheops.

Their gods long since submerged by grains of sand

Their temples swept by grains of sand and lost

Their dead tongued edicts shorn of old meaning

The broken bodies of their carved idols

Like the scattered jigsaw of a crime scene

We could not begin to know

How to worship Pharaohs now.

We stand before our Pyramids, gold crowned

The gold cap atop Cheops long torn down.