At the guttering dawn of civilization, when the first god-king ruled over what has, ever since, been our idea of a balanced society, Man, the singular masculine figure—hunter, warrior—faced his first demise.
In the city of Uruk, sat the last man of his people, the only warrior not reduced to servitude—or was he? One would prefer to think he paced the floor of his chamber. But, as the feather falls, one suspects that He was considering his legacy from a supportive chair, a prosthetic for an aging chief, having achieved a languid decrepitude beyond the wretched reach of his suffering slaves.
Previous kings had taken into Dust those who had served them in life, consigning their court to death, passing in fear, clinging to the living tatters of their mortal station.
This king, having seen his folly dancing upon the candlelit wall of his tomb of state like a tormented shade echoing within a beaten drum, resolved, in passing from life, to remain usefully among the living.
A rhyme teller of the goatherds—those outside the walls who had not yet forgotten their ancestors—stood by.
A grain counter, crouching over his soft clay tablet with his tallying stick in hand, waited with the melancholy patience of his kind.
He would breathe what he had seen from within the one-eyed belly of the beast called Love, so that the goatherd singer might dress it in rhyme, and the sad-eyed slave might carve it Into the Face of Time.
