So she’s a ruin, do you not have Rome
In your local wisdom crypt, her touchstones?
We’ve lost the aroma, of scholastic tones
From acrid halls where, all of them wrong, the tomes
Hang down like gyves on open catacombs,
Words of compulsion etched in powdered bones;
She sooner returns to dust before atones.
The holy we’ve known, her decadent foam,
Still scars the hillside rubble-strewn tableau,
Succeeded all-too-well in her mission;
Earth waits for us at a higher plateau
While we watch her spin from recognition.
Can we 'ere forget what we couldn’t know,
The bodies charred with our erudition?
