The Advantages of the Barbarians 


I had been reading History and gotten lost, so took my glasses off
And saw, not the eras described, their lists of terrible events,
But the moments shrunken and passed over, in footnotes with their asides
That tease the imagination. Not the great rivers, 
But the drowned dragged out of a river into my little room,
Where they mill around and complain. Not the ancient map,  
But that dip between mountains so narrow the cartographers overlooked it
On their lunch break, and there they are, that one man and that one woman,
Overlooked by History because when they hoe a rocky field they’re so tiny, 
And when they sleep in their straw mats they forget who they are.

First published in Gulf Coast.