A Barbarian’s Lament

Barbarians hammer, howling, at every gate.
Oh, wait. Did you think I meant migrants?
But they—the barbarians, not the migrants—really are coming for us.
And the gates are not the barbicans set up at all our arbitrary boundaries of nation, state, city, no;
Not security checkpoints or passport control: rather, they are the intangible avenues to the better life we each think we deserve.
The better life we somehow think we’ve earned.
A land of exceptionalism, where freedom rings. Where hope abounds. Where opportunity settles like manna from the sky,
And justice is an opulent feast in which everyone—baron, beggar, abbess, whore—can partake.
But this faeryland is a porcelain dream, frangible as a hummingbird’s egg. It is a dream possible but never likely, because its unfulfillment nurtures vandals, and vandals beget vandals, reveling in the rapture of destruction.
Once, only young, we hurled rocks through abandoned windows and laughed at the glorious music of their shattering.
Grown, windows are beneath our dignity. Dreams disintegrate with a far more gratifying song.
They’re coming, the barbarians, or else are here already. They’re everywhere: in the halls of power, in the sanctuaries of faith, in the charnel houses of commerce and industry.
Helpless, I watch the hordes storm the ramparts
While I mourn the dreamers and the dream.
And I wonder: how does a global superpower become a failed state? or a bounteous garden become an arid waste? Was the dream always so fragile? Have we always sown the seeds of our own demise?
So now it’s the world entire, joining in the bacchanalia of destruction. Because fury is simpler than sorrow. Cruelty easier than kindness.
Lies more palatable than truth.
I have seen them coming, the barbarians. The barbarians at every gate: relentless and invincible—because they are us.

 Lawrence Blair Goral
8 January 2024
Bayfield, Colorado