Tumbling Columns and Lonely Bas-Reliefs

Lay to rest the suckling baby
gnawing at history's teat
at the bed of red rocked ruins,
swept by the sand
sprawled across the continents
like a hazy blanket
that stings my eyes.
Doomed,
is the child to grow old
and crumble the statues
so delicately placed beneath its
smooth feet.
Its mother is blind,
father deaf
and his vision struck with
sights of melancholy
veins pumping round cells of passion.

Save the dangling baby!
He hangs by coarse cloth threads
from a worn Doric remnants
lost and sought by centuries of sticks in sand
and chariot cars side by side.
Or watch him fall!
Some say to not let his toothless smile
fool the eye of the moral innocence inside
for the child
(so they say)
is a dirty old man
mad and too muddled with
five thousand years of plague.