Empires
In Malick, my cousins were clearing a drain.
Silt and vine were tangled in the water.
Muscle in the water like dregs of an abattoir.
When the river came down it brought panty-wash,
dialysis swill and original bones
from mansions hid in the northern hills
The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss.
But haven’t we built such beautiful homes
on the hillside coming down.
Empires of one-one brick and pillar post.
Empires of galvanise and dirt.
I stood in my English clothes and watched
my cousins make a river flow again,
and colour come back to the earth.
Copyright © 2025 by Anthony Joseph. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 3, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Empires’ deals with the reclaiming of space. It was inspired by a memory of seeing my cousins clearing a canal in Trinidad. The water had run down from the mountain, almost as if coming down from history. There was something in the image about how we had reclaimed a space from a history of colonialism, and slavery, and had constructed beautiful homes and spaces among the ruins of this history. It also is, in a small way, about my own complex positionally, as someone in exile, at ‘home’ on ‘holiday,’ looking on as my cousins reclaim and remake a space I left behind.”
—Anthony Joseph
Anthony Joseph
Anthony Joseph is the author of Haunting the Black Air (Bloomsbury, 2026) and Sonnets for Albert (Bloomsbury, 2022), which won the 2022 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. A lecturer and musician, Joseph lives in London.