If Men, Then by Eliza Griswold

Author:Eliza Griswold
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

2

We compete. We do.

We race to places faster and after,

judge the other’s page—

huh, that’s all she got—

yet offer our last Tampax,

dearer than the ten thousand crisp dollars

with serial numbers after 2015

we also hand over.

3

When we die, all

pettiness dissolves.

We form a furious army

that stares down the Elah Valley

at a figure eight feet tall

clad in brass and swinging

his sword and balls around.

One stone brings him down.

BAKER’S TOMB, 30 BC

The baker Eurysaces built a monument

to suffering. A former slave,

he bought his flesh with sweat.

His grave, a marble oven,

shelters pigeons

in a Roman roundabout.

Knapsacks burdened with ambition,

we were terrible fellows,

unwilling to accept

the less hope of success

the more room for the soul.

Who cared for the soul?

The soul would come later,

or never—its knowledge born

of failure. We weren’t born to fail.

Our will was all we knew

and we raged at a world

that wouldn’t give against it.

Eurysaces the audacious dared

to immortalize the unglamorous

daily devotion that saved him.

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