The origin of a nation

"Tiger, tiger, burning bright
in the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?"
William Blake

"Then others would come, tigers,
Blake’s fiery tiger;
Then would come other golds,
the loving metal that was Zeus,
the ring that every nine nights
begets nine rings, and these, nine,
and there is no end."
Jorge Luis Borges

I remembered Borges this morning
while a building crumbled in Bangkok.

I watched him with such clarity on the phone screen,
paused the video, and remembered Borges saying
that the most devastating tiger was gold,
but the origin was Blake, who must have seen it first,
terribly reflected in the creation of someone or something.
Blake asked again and again about its origin.
The origin is singular, the beginning slowly threads itself,
looking everywhere, hesitantly picking
the lesser details and the greater circumstances of the created artifact.

I rewind the video and think of that beautiful building that took centuries,
many centuries to build,
its origin traced back to the cracks in the rocks
that humans surely pecked at with their nails.

The collapse of the building happened slowly
or as quickly as I wished to see it on the shiny screen.
I’ve thought many times, more than I’d like,
about the origin of a nation,
alone, shuffling the effect of my modern humanity,
the absolute loneliness of the eyes,
the need to isolate desire for myself.

The present is a distant sound, I don’t know what it is,
but it means something, something I can’t identify.
I don’t know my origin, I’d like to think it’s an image
and likeness of Borges' tiger that blinds him, or Blake’s tiger,
to whom no answer was ever given.

The origin of a nation should perhaps be like the sun,
always to the west, halted, instantaneous, perfect.
An uncertain nation, because if I take from here and from there
those scraps of history from the past will carry things I resent,
the holes between the trees, for example,
those that let in the sun I cannot contain,
even though I’ve stopped the sunset.

The origin is bound to fade
and bound to stay
like the silence after the roar of the building’s fall in Bangkok,
even though beneath, in the depths, the dead sleep on the ruins,
as at the beginning, when they scratched a hole in the stones with their nails.