Chinese history is one vast attempt to wrest
meaning out of the trigrams of Fu Hsi.
It’s the Yahwist’s conundrums for us in the West –
from Moses through Caesar to Ackroyd/Belushi.
Eons from now they’ll start looking for clues
to the lost pronunciation of ampersands
and hyphens painted in various yellows, blues,
and reds in the caves of Postmodern Man.
And they’ll spend their subsequence working out our charts.
You can be sure they won’t neglect our gory parts –
like TV, our true penitentiary.
They’ll ponder the sacrifices through which were won
improvements in the combinatorial arts
that led to the Era of Common Fun.
Alas, the crass mastery of our century!