Empire

Photo by Davide Metrangolo from Pexels.

Carly Ungerer

Empire

Empires like these are built

Year by year,

Brick by brick,

But, oh, they fall so quickly.❇

And so carefully I have constructed mine.

I have angled,

Analyzed,

Arranged my ascent.

I dug my bleeding fingers in

And climbed my mountain of ambition.

I was never given power. 

I took it,

In power moves, 

machiavellian machination,

and calculated silences.

I have earned,

Clawed my way to, ❉

Every scrap of power.

I have built my control,

And the time has come to fall.

Am I an Icarus,

Reaching too high,

Too quickly?

Was a meteoric fall the result

Of an overambitious rise?

Or am I Lucifer,

Too loud too keep my wings?

Did I steal, rather than earn?

And am I blinded

By hubris?

I carved myself a podium,

A place of solitary power.

But a pedestal is a vulnerable place to be,

Exposed on all sides.

It was easy to be knocked off.

In my place, they put you,

Hands uncalloused by the chisel that carved it.

Where I rest in the rubble

Of the power amassed

The empire I built remains out of my reach.

This column of stone knows not

The iron of your blood,

Nor the salt of your tears

My blood, my sweat, my tears

Have whet the stone.

It is yours now,

This pedestal unbloodied by your hands,

A peak of a mountain with only lightning above.✣

Your ascent was laid at your feet,

Along a trail that I blazed.

❇ “Rome wasn't built in a day, but it burned in one.” (John Heywood)

❉ “Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it.” (David Foster Wallace) 

✣ “At the top of the mountain and what is left for me but lightning?” (Friedrich Nietzsche)