Chess
Sometimes, impatient just to have things happen
I take your pawn, knowing you’ll take mine.
How else will the game develop? We can’t skirt each other
endlessly, and I respect how the game deprives
us both of room. Better to get on with it:
brotherhood doesn’t exist on this board.
Instead, there’s hardship, competition – this medieval
game, a form of early capitalism.
I love the pensive bishops, the tangential rooks.
I love the knights, their horses flailing in battle –
but they keep jumping into the future
where the tanks and the nuclear bombs are:
aggression rises as it does in modern nations.
Even today, we still experience the frail type,
whose power is predominantly symbolic
who can only dodder one space at a time.
And then there is the truly regal one –
who, suddenly, half by chance, finds supremacy –
like the queen moving along a vector
nobody had foreseen, and she transforms our life.