He spits dry air on the killers who leap from their sides-
he knows them, a killer too, conqueror of tribes
who built an empire. But he knows slaughter
from eternal death, the difference between the blood
soaked into stone and flowers to build a great city
and this ceaseless scraping away of life after life,
sucking into the sky all the good from the land-
stone ancestors, beaten gold, the hands of warriors
grown soft around the gods' gifts, their boxes of light
that lure his children from the smell of dirt and animal fur,
the blade forged in fire, the eternal order of things
from village to city. The eternal order of human life.
Even ghosts can delude themselves in righteous anger.