The Terracotta Warriors

are visiting Melbourne. 
China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang

had them made as Guardians of Immortality,
part of his quest to cheat death

and become a god.
Queues to see the Warriors snake out

of the gallery, around the rectangular pool
so many use as a wishing well.

In towns all over the east of the country
people are lining up for water rations,

the Murray-Darling river system
            is floundering.
Months after the death of millions of fish

nobody can say for sure what happened
or whose fault it was. Murray cod, silver perch

and bony bream corpses washed up on banks, 
floated in the barely flowing rivers and lakes.

When I was a kid, we ate smoked cod
on Good Friday, a reminder about Jesus

and sacrifice. Slow cooked butter and salty,
the memory tastes slippery like childhood,

scrape of forks on the good china, holding the
            flesh in my mouth.
Legend has it that Qin Shi Huang

imbibed mercury, hoping for an eternal life
elixir, but it killed him. To prevent panic at his

unexpected end (hide the stink) his body was 
transported in a cart surrounded by rotting fish.

Today, the whiff of death lingers, a woman interviewed
says her home along the river now smells

permanently like a fish market—a vast stench hiding
            something dead 
that we can’t quite name or look at yet. Eight thousand

statues built over thirty six years by seventy thousand 
workers. I try and picture the daily labour, underground,

toil of hands, a life spent building one man’s legacy. 
The Warriors were unearthed, two centuries later,

by farmers digging a field
             (stones roll, saviours rise). 
Our push for permanence runs deep. Hubris to think

we can outwit the end, play god with 
what we’re given, bend nature to our will,

eyes on the miraculous or apocalyptic horizon.
            How about this—
by a lake or river, cup water in your hand,

could you drink it, would you want to, and if not,
            what then?