What Is Jade?

Question: when were these words said?
“My dream is to buy a house
In my hometown and marry

A beautiful girl.” China,
In the nineteenth century?
America, yesterday?

Ancient Rome? Ancient Egypt?
In the trenches of a war?
As it happened, yesterday

Beside a collapsed jade mine
Where hundreds of miners died
The day before in a slide

Is the right answer, this time.
It could have been any time,
Or almost. The young man’s dream—

Success, windfall, resources,
High status where he grew up,
And an enviable spouse.

He’ll be back, digging for jade
In the mud in a few days,
Along with more survivors.

The odds are long against him,
Long and cruel for all of them,
All the young inheritors

Of ancestors’ strategies
That worked somehow to create
Them, their fantasies, their lives.