Polar Hall

“After the Tang, the feature no longer

Appears in imperial capitals.”

We propound a strange religion, of which

None ever speaks, a faith without worship

Which proposes no correspondences

Between the outer world and what we wish,

But which honors the correspondences

Between our contradictory beliefs,

Almost all of which do the opposite,

Preferring to quarrel over the true

Divinely sanctioned sources of magic

And the truest measurements of the real.

The wish is the magic, the words the spell,

The acts of prayer and sacrifice the art

By which rituals charm and enchant us,

So that we will move rivers and mountains

To more closely approximate the stars,

To persuade and compel one another

That our particular wishes are theirs,

That they wanted the palace, the throne room,

The temple, the mountaintop telescope,

The empire, the new lights of satellites,

The continental lenses, the lenses

In stones, in caves, on street corners, in homes.

We wish them to understand they wanted

It all, what we wanted, to work with us,

To work for us, to wish with us, to pray

Our prayers and sing our hymns with us, for us,

As they ram the mud to mortar our walls

And rake the fields to grow our meals. We wish

That no one, not even the kings themselves,

Not even the best beneficiaries

Of all the best wishes, fabulously

Powerful mortals, fabulously rich,

Will notice that this is the religion

Of the wishes themselves, ourselves, of which

None of us, none of them, none of you speaks.