Is it the king’s foot soldiers
or the farmers cooked in sweltering heat
that let the kingdom breathe?
When the crown inhales,
is it smoke from rifles
or steam rising from wounded earth at dawn?
Answer carefully.
Every empire has mistaken
the sound of marching
for the sound of survival.
Is violence fodder for civilisation,
or is fodder what civilisation fattens
so it may auction violence
beneath ceilings lacquered in obedience?
Do you think a throne can stand on femurs of steel?
How long can a ribcage hold a rifle
before it forgets how to hold hunger?
Can you build a kingdom of starved sentinels,
feed them flags instead of bread,
feed them enemies until appetite becomes allegiance,
feed them obedience until their spines
calcify into permanent salutes?
Would you trade grains for bullets?
Would you grind harvest into ammunition
and baptise it patriotism?
Would you salt the earth with blood and bones
and call it fertile?
If you would,
you are where you should be;
buried in the marrows of history,
carved into the sculpted silence of stone.
But if you would not,
tell me this:
Why do you riddle the house of grains with bullets each time it dares to speak?
Why must every barn that questions blood
become an altar?
Why must the soil prove loyalty
in corpses per acre?
You say the kingdom must survive.
But survival is not dominion.
And dominion is not breath.
Gunfire does not germinate.
Rifles do not photosynthesise.
Anthems cannot be boiled into porridge.
Borders do not sprout from bone.
We have mistaken blood-boots for heartbeats.
You cannot salt the earth with men
and expect wheat to forgive you.
You cannot starve the hands that feed you
and then blame the famine on dissent.
The kingdom breathes, yes —
but listen closely.
That is not oxygen.
It is a wheeze.
A throne pressing its full weight
on the ribs of the hungry.
And when the ribs give way,
the kingdom will finally learn what it was built on.
The mouth that demands worship swallows its own tongue.