The Dictator Fears Death
by Theodora Goss

He tried to put his name
on bridges, tunnels, terminals,
in gilded letters carved into the stone
of monuments, insisted he alone
could build the country, could construct
the future, that his fame
would long outlast the memory
of his prison camps, his masked police,
the children that his policies
had starved of air and light,
the general devastation and the blight
of toppled trees, of streams that ran
with waste, the fearful night
of his harsh reign. As long as, painted gold,
his name shone out from pediments,
his face appeared on mountainsides,
his statues filled the public squares,
his portraits hung in galleries.
His omnipresence guaranteed
a kind of immortality.

Alas, how inexorably
history moves on. Amid the rubble
of his triumph, he was laid beneath the only
stone that still bore his name,
where, beneath the loam,
the worms, in their fashion,
celebrated him.

(The image is Entrance to the Temple of Luxor by Louis Haghe.)