Jamestown, St. Augustine, Quebec, Santa Fe

A handful of seventeenth-century
European colonial outposts,
Actually, barely survived. You can tour

The associated sites to this day,
One with a still-standing stone fortress, two
Significant cities of some renown,

And one an archaeological site—
Not that any of these places today
Bear the faintest resemblance to back then,

When they were villages of starvation,
Desperation, and threatened mutinies,
Tiny collections of violent men

Perched precariously in countrysides
Mostly unknown to them, the loved homelands
Of rivalrous peoples of longstanding.

Is it constructive, now, to consider
How tenuous the initial foothold
Of colonists in North America?

Not for the historical fantasy
Of imagining alternate outcomes,
No, but for the analogy to all

Invasions and forcible settlements
Of an acquisitive, parasitic,
Or ecosystem-disrupting nature,

The species from other places, the germs
That somehow root well under bark or skin
And begin a killing inflammation,

The handful of copies of viruses
Eliminated again and again
Before the handful that get settled in.

Tomorrow’s flourishing communities
Of whatever happens to be alive then
May still be dealing with the legacy

Of how they got started, who they drove out,
What they burned down or chased to extinction,
Maybe humans. Maybe a few are here

Now, recent arrivals on shores of mind,
Unprepossessing, struggling, vulnerable
But invasive, soon to eat everything.