The Post-Colonial Error

Bronze Age lead pollution
From mining and smelting
Is still hanging around,

Dozens of centuries
Later, in places such
As the port of Corinth,

Where it’s been used to date
The port’s activity
To thirty-four hundred

Years before the present.
The Industrial Age
Just accelerated

Recently. It began
With kilns and factories
For beer, bread, pottery,

Dyes, and weapons, of course,
Weapons, millenniums
Earlier. The great world

Religions are younger,
All of them, than the first
Seams of industrial

Pollution. The heroes
Of Homeric epics
Waved around bronze edges

Culled from tin and copper
Mines torn into mountains,
Smelted in smoke and lead.

Logistics was always
The backbone of conquest,
And the colonial

Eras ran on enchained
Labor among their wastes
Before metaphysics,

Before the collected
Sayings of the sages
And enlightened teachers,

Before scraped codices
Were binding the sacred
Wisdom of the ancients,

And you think it started
And finished yesterday,
Your colonial age?