The jungle parted—and the city rose.
White limestone causeways cut the canopy
Like scars of light through the forest's throes
Of green, and at the end of each: the atopy
Of the pyramid, the temple-mountain
Climbing above the ceiba trees
Into the open sky—the fountain
Of the sacred, the stairway's frieze
Ascending from the human to the divine.
Tikal. Palenque. Copán. Calakmul.
The names roll like a temple's shrine-
Bell tolling through the canopy's wool
Of mist and rain—the Maya cities,
The jeweled and painted capitals
Of the Classic age, the ditties
Of whose glory and whose intervals
Of war and peace and art and astronomical
Precision built the most sophisticated
Civilization of the Americas' anatomical
And intellectual body—the elated
And terrible and beautiful achievement
Of the jungle's children.
A thousand years
Before the common era, the bereavement
Of the Olmec mother-culture's tears
And slow decline gave birth to the inheritor:
The Maya took the calendar, the glyph,
The pyramid, the jaguar—the anterior
Foundation of the Olmec motif—
And refined them to a brilliance
That would not be matched in the Americas
Until the European dalliance
And collision—the panoramas
Of the Maya mind were vast.
The writing:
Full logosyllabic script, the cast
Of eight hundred glyphs—the biting
And angular beauty of the carved
And painted word, the only writing
System in the pre-Columbian, the starved
And otherwise illiterate inviting
Of the American continent
To join the literate world:
The Maya scribe was the eminent
And sacred artist whose unfurled
Brush-pen moved across the bark-paper
Of the codex and the limestone face
Of the stela, recording the caper
And the conquest and the grace
Of the dynasty—for the Maya wrote
Their history: birth-dates and accession-dates,
The capture of the rival and the note
Of the bloodletting ritual, the fates
Of kings inscribed in stone that still
Speaks across the centuries to the epigrapher
Who has learned to read the quill
Of the ancient Maya calligrapher.
And the numbers—the Maya counted
In twenties, and they invented
The zero: the placeholder that amounted
To the revolution, theented
And abstract concept of the nothing
That holds the place of the absent quantity—
The Maya zero, like the Indian bluffing
Of the void into the antiquity
Of mathematics, was the independent
And convergent discovery of the mind's
Most counterintuitive and transcendent
Achievement: the number that finds
Its value in its emptiness.
And the calendar—the Long Count's
Architecture of time, the press
Of days accumulated in accounts
So vast they measured hundreds of millions
Of years: the baktun cycle of four hundred
Solar years, the billions
Of days stacked and numbered
In a system so precise
That the Maya astronomer could calculate
The synodic period of Venus—the splice
Of the evening and morning star's freight
Across the sky—to an accuracy
Of two hours in five hundred years:
584.2840 days, the uracy
Of the naked-eye observer whose arrears
Of error were less than those
Of the European astronomers who came
A thousand years later with the close
And calibrated instrument's claim
To superior knowledge.
And the eclipse—
The Maya predicted eclipses
With the Dresden Codex's apocalypse-
Tables, the ellipses
Of the moon's shadow calculated
And foretold—the priest-astronomer
On the temple's summit, the elated
And terrible announcer
Of the sun's death and resurrection,
The jaguar-sun descending to Xibalba,
The underworld's dark section,
And returning—the alba
Of the new day prophesied and fulfilled.
Palenque—the city of K'inich Janaab Pakal,
The great king whose tomb was billed
In the crypt beneath the Temple of the Banal
Inscription—no, the Temple of the Inscriptions,
The pyramid whose interior stairway
Led down to the sarcophagus, the descriptions
Of whose carved lid showed the Maya
King falling into the jaws of the earth-monster,
Descending to Xibalba to be reborn—
The jade death-mask on his face, the roster
Of jade and cinnabar and the worn
And precious offerings that accompanied
The king into the afterlife—the tomb
That rivaled Tutankhamun's, the remedied
And sacred womb
Of the pyramid's heart.
Tikal and Calakmul—
The superpower rivals of the Classic,
The two great cities whose beautiful
And savage competition was the Jurassic
And titanic struggle of the lowland Maya:
Alliance and betrayal, the star-war
Glyph that marked the total playa
Of destruction—the all-or-
Nothing warfare of the captured king
Brought back for sacrifice, the humbled
Dynasty replaced, the ring
Of vassal states that crumbled
And reformed around the victor—
The geopolitics of the jungle,
The realpolitik of the stricter
And more terrible bungle
Of divine kingship and its obligations.
And then—the collapse. The ninth century
Of the common era, the frustrations
Of a system stretched beyond the entry
Of sustainability: the population
Had outgrown the fragile jungle soil,
The slash-and-burn's rotation
Could not keep pace with the toil
Of feeding millions in the forest—
Drought came, the rains failed,
The reservoirs dried, the poorest
Starved first, and the curtailed
And desperate kings intensified the war
For diminishing resources—
And city after city closed its door:
The stucco crumbled, the forces
Of the jungle reclaimed the plaza,
The ceiba tree split the temple stairs,
The howler monkey sat in the piazza
Where the king had offered his prayers
And his blood to the gods who did not answer.
But the Maya did not vanish.
The dancer
Still dances, the language still flourishes—
Seven million Maya speakers nourish
The tongue that carved the glyph, the burnishes
Of the living culture unbroken
From the pyramid-builders to the present—
The Maya are not the token
And vanished past but the pleasant
And enduring and resilient thread
Of the Americas' oldest literate mind.
Honor the Maya—the scribes who read
The stars and wrote the time,
Who counted nothing and found the zero,
Who built the pyramid in the jungle's green
Cathedral, who made the king a hero
And a sacrifice, the seen
And the unseen woven into the glyph's
Angular and beautiful script—
Honor the astronomers on the cliffs
Of the temple-top, the stripped
And bloodied king whose offering fed
The calendar's insatiable count—
Honor the living and the dead,
The seven million voices at the fount
Of the oldest writing in the western world,
The Maya tongue still spoken
Where the jungle's flag is furled
And the ancient covenant unbroken.