Allegorical Nineveh

What’s one person’s defacement
Is another person’s face.

A largely illiterate
Imperial city, host

To a massive library
Funded by a ruthless king,

A human being’s body,
Young compared to the stories

And documents being stacked
In the palace recesses.

Then it all burns. Citizens
Not burned along with it flee.

The heat of the destruction
Preserves heaps of buried words,

But the city is done for,
And the royal family’s gone.

That garden-party carving
Of the royals sipping wine

By a tree decorated
With the decapitated

Head of a vanquished rival
Hung by a thong through his chin

Has been left behind, defaced,
The royals’ features gouged out.

Not the face of the trophy.
He’s still hanging there, as is.