Guarded from the people who elected them
and pay their wages, behind the high walls
of what was a country estate whose owners
hunted foxes for the fun, and answered
only to death and to penury,
the heads of state, with drums and with trumpets,
celebrate their fealty to weaponry –
while Australia’s forests are burning,
and bergs slip from glaciers into oceans
north and south, and melt discreetly, swiftly,
and Victoria Falls is silent, dry,
the plunging waters that were The Smoke
that Thunders, The Place of the Rainbow,
the plummeting river that became the Nile.
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By David Selzer