Doomed to Collapse

The Romans turned the Colosseum into a colossal quarry,
and were too stony hearted to admit that they were sorry
for Jews about how their great Temple’s treasures were displayed
by their arch enemy, vile Titus, on the arch he made,
and, according to some scholars, painfully then paid
for the Colosseum with its treasures and a Jew-slave trade,
each stone quarried from the Colosseum, like a fossil
recalling the ruins of an extinct empire, less colossal
than of Britannia’s who once ruled the waves till her decline
and fall caused her to share the Roman empire’s storyline,
both empires like the Colosseum not doomed to collapse
or quite extinct, but suffering a permanent relapse,
and irreligious, basically, though Rome still has a Pope,
and Britain a royal family whose opera is soap.
We all are doomed to fates that are quite similar to these,
declining till we fall, an unpreventable disease.

Historiatimelines.com reported on 12/2/13 (“Colosseum ‘built with loot from sack of Jerusalem temple’”) that the Colosseum was built with the spoils of the sack of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. A chiselled Latin inscription discovered in the Colosseum tells how a senator, Lampaudius, had the Colosseum restored in AD 443, and reads in translation: “The Emperor Caesar Vespasian Augustus had this new amphitheatre erected with the spoils of war.” Cinzia Conti, the director of surface restoration at the Colosseum, explained on 12/2/13 in Historiatimelines.com reports: “There is no doubt what war this was, the sack of Jerusalem.”

Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976.  Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.