Our Damaged Empire

 Mary Oliver 

We will be known as a culture that feared death and adored power,
that tried to vanquish insecurities for the few
and cared little for the penury of the many. 

We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke little if at all about the quality of life 

for people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. 

All the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a commodity.

And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was,
and they will also say that our politics was no more than an apparatus

to accommodate the feelings of the heart,
and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

Poem: Of the Empire

From the book: Devotions