When the nerve gas has at last dissipated and
the guards in the hexagonal watchtower have
all gone insane, the leopard-skinned men exit
their cells, where they have spent the entirety
of their lives, and enter the mysterious ocean.
The moon’s image breaks apart on that black
surface, as on an insect’s compound eye, and
the barbed urchins alive beneath it disappear.
The poison they secrete can crystallize blood
and turn marrow-rich bone into hollow rock.
Heedless of even the four-headed devil birds
circling the barrier reef, the leopards advance
through the towering, ice-cold waves, leaving
behind their already-forgotten dead weighted
to the bottom by caskets crammed with gold.
They believe that somewhere in the far north,
within an ancient crater, are the tombs where
their progenitors buried all feeble preexisting
races and began a dispersal of their own tribe
across the wasteland in which bitumen burns.
And yet, assuming they live through the night,
they will speak of their age in the dungeon as
their happiest, when they heard in their heads,
with utter clarity, the imperious voice of their
long-dead mother, urging them into the light.