Sonnet for the Terracotta Warriors
 

The adolescent Emperor Qinshihuang,
child ruler of the state of Qin, whose tomb
would one day hold three thousand wives, who rang
his bells with childless concubines in rooms
they flooded out with phosphorus when the act
was done, whose hollow-bodied warriors
and clay-foot horses melded with the black-
streaked mud of Xanxing’s vanished borders –
whose sixty thousand laborers interred
beside his mummified remains might make
you think of egomania (preferred
affliction of the despot) – built a lake
of mercury to catch the rising sun,
and couldn’t count beyond the number one.  

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Alex Grant is a native Scot. His poetry has recently appeared in Arts & Letters, North American Review, Connecticut Review and Eleventh Muse, among others. He was WMSU's 2004 Pavel Srut Scholarship winner, and in 2006 won the KAKALAK Anthology contest, and the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize for his book Chains & Mirrors, published by Harperprints. He was a recent finalist for The Felix Pollak, Brittingham and Discovery/The Nation Prizes. He lives with his wife and his dangling participles in Chapel Hill, NC.
E-mail: sandersgrant at yahoo dot com  

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"Sonnet for the Terracotta Warriors" was first published in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Fall 2005.

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kaleidowhirl  |  spring 2007