Never What It Used To Be

12 January 2024

As Augustus created political morality,
we end it, and quash the libido dominandi
by conquering only as a last resort.
No peace secured through conquest shall endure,
now or forevermore, for pent up rage
must tear the fabric of the law.
I hear the call of this new herald
summoned by these years of struggle,
and it says we are great peoples,
in the plural, and if something moral
still remains, it is the ash of Vesta
with her embers glowing in each private hearth,
not in the hearth of state, and to all those
who would revive a prior time, she says
that it was never what it used to be
and could not be so now.