JVD

The place was hostile but they stayed,
Confident of a keeping God who’d sent
Destruction once, but said he did repent
Him of it and told them not to be afraid.

Then it returned, though not by his own hand,
Who must have seen but came not to arrest,
And so they perished, with the brand
Of their sometime king upon their breast.

They prosper elsewhere and have made a State,
But the settled life their soil once bred
Is gone–its types, its tales–and now they dread
Uncertainty, as we do, becoming fate.