from Verb Sap
In March 2001, the Taliban authorities destroyed two huge ancient figures of the Buddha at Bamiyan, Afghanistan.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: �Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...' Shelley, Ozymandias
Here's what remains: colossal holes in rock.
Not even legs. Each trunk's just that: hollow,
an opened, empty, god-sized box.
Raided tombs, recesses shaped like Pharaohs'
coffins or their huge cast shadows.
At their absent ancient feet: boulders,
rubble, mortar casings, spent ammo shells,
Taliban on Toyota trucks - Allahu
Akbar! ...Meanwhile, back in Kabul,
it's hush-hush Video Night - venue:
the old World-Wide language school. Banned,
but what the hell. Soldiers, perhaps ex-students,
scratch lengthening beards, bum smokes
or fiddle softpacks from black turbans.
Some place Kalashnikovs in stooks,
pass round a plastic lighter, trade contraband,
squat on the mat. Swarzenegger's back.
Tonight his sneer of cold command's
getting personal with a laser-sighted
45 slide; while the late-model terminator,
unperturbed, just mops up punishment,
absorbs whatever's handed out. Boof!
And - here's the groovy thing - from it he learns
to - how you say? - shape-shift, morph.
Once Buddha was just an empty throne.
Round here his face grew Greek or Persian,
half-way between Apollo and a king.
Xerxes, or Iskander perhaps, robes grown
stony with potency. Or Kanishka,
whose idea these statues were. - His own
headless statue stood back in Kabul:
enormous pantaloons, mighty kingly feet.
He got his last week. Full circle.
For centuries, huge mummies
wrapped in grubby bandages of rock
stood here, blind to passing armies.
Today, they blew away his legs and chin
- tank shells, rocket launchers - then
dynamited that big mother up to heaven.
It took twenty-five explosions
to wipe the smile right off that face,
incarnate him as dust, air, an empty throne.
Bars of light across eyes, mouths that whisper
through the hatches of shapeless prisons:
women, in chador, burqas, watch the distance,
rebel gunfire where the mountains rise.