Fool’s Gold

The river descending cast water over stones
And the brown-rust lightness of its ripples
Moved against the flow in the sun’s light.

Down in the gravel beds the poor fools panned
Among the grains for the smallest metal,
For precious cargo in the eroded world.

The idea of gold
Had come upon them,
A glamour in their eyes.

The river cascaded over rock so old, so lined
Only hardness remained, all fractures long broken.
And it tumbled down another mile to the sea of sands
Where, layer after layer, the weight of it
Would build mountains once again.

Even as they went looking, life was ebbing
Day by day, even when some glitter leapt through
The refracting, rolling water in their hands.
Each tiny shard of value stared back from the grit;
This, it reminded them, is not your gold,
Not yours at all.

In the end they left for the highlands, unchanged
But made so much poorer by avarice, weakened
By their labours and debilitating desires;
They climbed higher and higher for whatever gold
They sought must lie somewhere.

But by these journeys
They did not arrive;
Change passed them over
For the base metal
Of their hope and fear
Still weighed heavy.

Transmutation
Brought nothing
But gold that never was.

© BH, 2017

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Never one for prospecting, me. This is about our true something-for-nothing ideology: the pursuit of what rudimentary economists once called ‘free goods’. The idea that you could head off to terra nullius and strip out a fortune from the bare earth was as fantastic as turning base metals into gold. Never mind the consequences for those who might live there.

But we still follow the dream till it dies, just as our forebears died in the river beds, on mountainsides, all because of an enchantment with something shiny and valuable.

It is a madness we fall heir too; the more so as we try to struggle out of the mess we’re in. Dig ourselves all the deeper in the mire and, at the end, nothing turns into anything.

Note:

1. The illustration, by the way, is the earth processed by an alembic. In the hope that we will, someday, distill something pure from our demon efforts. 
2. The word 'glamour' is used here on its archaic Scots sense or 'enchantment' or 'magic'.