The Emperor's Children
Shannon Anderson
We are the emperor’s children,
raised on a pretty patchwork of possibility
and cultivated to resemble a dream, potent and pure.
Feeding on imitation, we are assembled
by prostitutes of religious conviction.
Thick with facts and figures
we devour titles on the proverbial bookshelf,
consuming until we are stagnant counterfeits,
isolated shadows of a collaborative effort.
We falter and, floundering, throw back whisky tumblers of love.
Close your eyes and it’s easier to ignore
the admonitions of war widows and feral foxes
who repeat that we are accountable for the ones we tame,
and who snivel, “This was how I was bred into a stranger,
even to myself.”
But might the sky have been a sweeter cerulean?
Might the warm rock, glorious on the riverbank,
have beckoned with a simpler sanctuary
that you and I could have found a whispering reason
to mollify our infantile hunger?
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