Who needs to read Gibbon
nowadays, when you can turn on
the television, or check Twitter,
or just look out the window,
and see a crumbling empire for yourself?
Who wants to be sold a narrative of the past,
neatly packaged in seven volumes
(six easy payments of $19.99, whispers the TV salesman),
the messy denouement of a people and their world
charted like a map, lines from point A to B to Z?
Who can stand to tear their eyes away
from the ominous swaying of the scaffolds
that have held us up for time immemorial?
From wood bending and joists shaking,
from splinters and cracks, boughs bending and breaking,
from the long and dreadful distance to the ground?
Perhaps, though, when the world has burned
and if I am unscorched, I shall read Gibbon,
learn from him how to tell the story
of a world torn apart, how first to decline
and then, at last, to fall.