Did I live lone enough to see the Eagle soar? Surely I did not survive to it fall.

And yet, over and over, from this shadow of the living world ever beyond time, I see the Eagle rise anew. Only to see it fall again.

Would that Augustus had listened to me! Would that Aeneas had burned on a pyre as fitting as Homer proclaimed for Hektor. Only approaching the shadows could I see the horror that my Aeneid had done.

My epic of Troy’s most famous survivor, as ancestor of our own Romulus and Remus, transformed into a myth to favor our Empire and our Caesar. A state that shed raging seas of blood to fertilize the Earth with corpses.

And for what? So that the ruins of our society can enchant the ascendant descendants of those we murdered? Oh, well did Dante use me as his guide to hell, for its contours I know all too well.

The Eagle rises, the Eagle falls, the Eagle rises again. Woe to the next bard that so worships its flight!

Declination

 a memorial

alone

for Sue Vincent’s Thursday photo prompt: Shadows #writephoto