The Great Maya Collapse

Here—hush the hum; let History’s lamp burn white,
Deep in the jade heart where the warm rains lean;
Cities lie mute beneath the drumming night,
Pyramids moor their peaks in ocean green;
Roots braid the courts; the jaguar melts from sight,
While stone-lipped gods keep counsel, cold, unseen.
Forgot by empires, rumor, book, and chart,
They breathe in leaves and speak in dust and heart.

They counted years with stars in patient files,
A clockwork sky they courted, grave and bright;
They tuned their glyphs to thunder’s secret miles,
Set Venus like a flint for war and rite;
Corn was their blood, their labor, and their smiles,
Their king the wound that fed the hovering night—
He stung the day with obsidian and flame,
And bargained rain by pouring out his name.

Not one vast throne, but many burning towers—
Sistered yet rival—traded kiss for knife;
They wove alliances like jungle flowers
And pruned them, too, with ritual of strife;
Yet art rose greenly through those crimson hours,
And time was laced to calendar and life.
A zero bloomed—shell-quiet—perfect, round,
And made their reckonings a templed sound.

Then silence came, at first a hairline crack:
A date uncarved, a stele left half-told;
A paved way halts; the mason does not back
To lift his stone or set the shining mold.
Walls sprout in haste, crude thorns against attack;
Fine jades grow dull, bright pigments rust to mold.
The king’s voice thins; the plazas thin with fear—
A hush that even howler throats can hear.

War, once a mask, learned teeth and learned to stay;
The jaguar cloak grew matted, fierce, and torn;
Captives like dark rain littered mural day,
And vows were broken on the courts of corn.
Trade-roads went blind; the farmers kept away;
Fields learned the taste of absence more than dawn.
The serpent banners snapped in famished air—
A drum that beat, and found no answer there.

And still another knife, self-turned, was bared:
The forests fell to lime’s devouring bright;
White cities drank a thousand acres flared,
Till hills went nude and soils slid from their height.
With trunks unbound, the thunder’s gift despaired;
Dry season lengthened into iron night.
What fed their splendor bled their future dry—
Each temple chipped a furlong from the sky.

Then heaven locked its blue Pythagoras,
And drought like scripture ruled a century’s page;
Cenotes tongued with dust, and reservoirs
Crackled like lips that cannot speak for age.
Corn failed, and with it fell the calendars;
The priest-king’s smoke could not commute that wage.
He cut and called; the rain withheld reply—
The pact unthreaded where the blood ran dry.

So cities learned the grammar of goodbye:
A pot still warm; a stair half-climbed by noon;
A mother turns her face from temple sky,
And walks her children toward some smaller moon.
The jungle, patient, closed a careful eye,
Then dreamed the pyramids to seed and dune.
Roots read the stones; the parrots coined new laws,
And time resumed its older, vaster cause.

But endings are not graves for living tongues.
North on the salted wind, new markets grew;
Kukulkan’s feathered whisper combed the lungs
Of merchant oars that stitched a different blue.
And even when the iron psalter stung,
The people bent, but would not break in two:
They kept the corn, the weaving, and the word—
A music cities lost, but villages heard.

O reader, dim your lantern one more shade;
The mirror of these leaves will show your face:
A clever world on balances it made,
A hunger building monuments to grace;
Cut less of forest, spend less of the blade,
And hold some rain in trust for some dim place.
For cycles love to circle back again—
And pride climbs fastest when it smells of rain.

So let the noise fall back like evening’s foam;
We walk the green where empires learn to rest.
The silent cities are not wholly stone—
They throb in seed, in story, and in breast.
If night must teach, then let this be our home:
To count our days, and number mercy best.
For what endures is not the shouting throne,
But hands that plant, and stars that speak in bone.