They Ruled the People Nearest to Them, and Those People Ruled the People Next to Them in Turn

It’s possible the Europeans
Will be recalled as the Scythians
Were recalled by Europeans,

As violent brutes who invented
New technologies of weaponry
And not much else. Civilization,

Literature and philosophy,
New ways of thinking about the world,
Will be seen from the periphery

As coming from the peripheral
Corners of the colonial age,
As the Scythian peripheries

Came to believe their Greeks or Chinese
Were the wells of their own traditions.
Descendants of assimilation

Have always made the borrowed their own,
First in practice, later in story.
It’s not as if the Israelites,

Back from Babylon, annotated
Their flood myth with careful references
To ancient Sumerian sources.

History pelts cultural waters
And concentric, overlapping rings
Spread out as each center’s forgotten,

And history’s barely beginning.
The storm that’s coming isn’t the end.
The downpour’s erasures and splatter

Are only going to get more hectic,
Faster events in quicker eras,
Waves crisscrossing staccato blossoms.