When the winners took us to their country
to be pets, like a cony that a princess saved
from the naked line of beaters, the parti-colored
silken lancers and the king in green and gold,
we remembered this: that one of us had lain
a day and a night beneath his family
bloating and blackening in the sun
as soldiers sifted through corpses for half-corpses
to favor with a final thrust. Another
was watching from our one unfallen tower
as they lifted up the head of our chief soldier
on a pike, clicking their tongues to the crows. Then how
could we let ourselves play, when they asked us
for our famous song, and lift our steps that turn
dark and light and the spring
and the autumn rains? Groaning we kept still.
we were like gravid widows who shut up
the betrayed womb
with a staple of will. But our harps.
Had their curved and firm young shapes come from hell?
And they had lain against us all those years
only waiting? Our harps by themselves
when we hung them up on the willows
if ever an air stirred, sung.
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