爾 / Your

Sir Richard Francis Burton, The City of the Saints, 1861. 
  
  
 Your republic is a land of misnomers: “America”
 not one nation but a continent, your “Indians”
 no denizens of a mislocated East. 
 Even your transcontinental throws its yoke 
 not across one imagined country 
 but several. You cannot even claim 
 this territory of the Mormons, those bloody 
 hashshashayim as you would call them, 
 their Brigham Young a Shaykh-el-Jebel 
 planning to liberate another newborn Mecca. 
 Just as in Egypt, this Zion, too, 
 was plagued by locusts, its Asiatic fields 
 demolished of maize, the limpid waters so polluted 
 with carcasses, a thirsty mullah in this desert
 would long for beer. 
                                                             Your nation 
 built a railroad to draw you closer 
 to the East; now you find the East 
 already within you. But such a disappointing 
 version of it! I look in vain for Mormon 
 out-house harems, and find nothing 
 but farmhouses in which the wives are stored 
 like any other stock or grain. Polygamy 
 is conducted with an air of business, the women 
 married not for sex but because servants 
 are more costly here. And yet it’s women 
 over which they would revolt, 
 these Mormons bedeviled by a government 
 that declares polygamy and slavery sister 
 institutions.  Congress cannot attack one,
 they say, without infringing on the other,
 thus “Dixie” do some locals call this place, 
 their favorite toast, "We can rock 
 the cradle of Liberty without Uncle Sam 
 to help us!”  Absolute 
 independence, absolute sovereignty 
  
 is their aim, this Deseret exclusive as Tibet 
 to their defensive faith.  Your government fears 
 a war with China. But men out here all know
 the war will come within.  How can you subdue
 what you do not truly know, how circumscribe  
 this globe without a clearer eye to truth? 
 These Mormons do not even celebrate
 your “glorious” 4th, transferring those honors instead 
 to a later date that recalls their city's survival 
 from the locusts.  On that day, I walked out 
 of Great Salt Lake to see its cemetery: 
 the one place both sinner and saint might reside
 together in peace. There, I found a row
 of women tending crosses, heads tucked
 as they swept the stones, each one carved 
 with a gull wheeling in the marble.
 Such pretty, powerless things! No hunters
 like your famous eagle, though according 
 to local legend, it was the gulls that finally came, 
 and devoured all the locusts.