Alchemisland

From a distant ship’s drip wet foredeck

Allies straddling still the winedark sea, awaiting clearance

Watch deathbringer Achilles reduce to scree

Properties inside which Troy’s unfamiliar Gods linger.

In lines are masterless fighters:

Vast cannibal tribes barely upright,

Hoplites with hex-imbued pilums.

Skull-chipping the dart-accurate stones of peltasts and casters

The dead left behind

Their blind-led-blind lives marked by ankle-high stone piles

All too late, the onlookers revelate,

That the making of such beasts is the unmaking of just nations.