TRIBE

One by one. With each stupidity, they have removed the stone that held the wood, that made the wall, that was what we called “Home”. The Stockade. Among the flints of the hill fort of the most powerful of all the tribes. The whose name we do not remember. Where the chill wind blew even in summer, to remind us it would soon be winter.

So the granite faces of Gods, the Easter Island statues stare back, black-eyed. Tell us, what we had forgotten we knew. The castles in the air that defined us. Told us what we were, and more importantly, were not. Without the stockade, and the ditch where the nettles grew high. And in the wildwood where the mayflies danced in the shafts of sun. Without the oak trunks, split by blistered, sunburnt men. Sunk deep in blood and soil, there is no inside, no outside. No definition: no tribe. No East, no West.

The curse of a never-ending equality. The Search, those wiser and further East did not need to waste themselves pursuing. They who needed only a goat’s skin of water, while we drowned in much too much, we could no longer drink.

The Agenda. Turning a blind eye. Lazy to the widows lying down to sleep in the flames of the pyre. Piled higher with each season. Each government. Each election and prayer to Gods that did not exist. Who stared back with impassive granite eyes at the folly of our offerings. With the elite of arrogance and greed and economics that knows nothing else besides. Elders betrayed the young. Robbed them of identity. Robed them in self doubt. In the fear of fear itself.

The illusion that in this age, we did not need the stone that held the wood, that was the wall, that was the tribe. That was us. The idea of us, is them. Until the first of the October winds blew East, and the waves gathered grey with the luminous orange lifejackets discarded in the channel. The Barbarians never were at the gates. They were already within. Seated round an oval mahogany Cabinet table.

And so the snow drifted, with no stockade fence or ditch and furrow to lean against. Only the frozen bodies of the nameless tribe that died, not of war or famine, but from complacency.