Nuts Of An Empire Teach Poem by Basim Alansari

The chestnut trees of Europe

still speak in quiet tongues beneath the rain, 

their roots entangled with forgotten roads

laid down by Roman hands.
…
Empires rarely vanish cleanly.

They remain in fragments; 

in broken aqueducts, 

in the curve of old stone bridges, 

in laws no one remembers inheriting, 
and in forests altered by ambition.
…
The Romans conquered with discipline, 

with iron, 

with roads drawn straight across the earth

as though geography itself could be commanded.
…

But even they did not escape time.
Their banners fell.

Their emperors dissolved into dust.

Marble cracked beneath winters

they once believed belonged to them.
…
Yet the chestnut trees remained.
Not planted for beauty,

nor for the sweetness of their fruit alone, 

but for survival.

Their timber regrew after every cutting, 
supplying fire,
shelter,
ships
and expansion.
…

An empire fed itself
from living things

that understood renewal
better than kings did.
…
And centuries later, 

someone still gathers chestnuts in autumn, 

still roasts them over fire in villages

that no longer speak Latin, 

still walks through forests shaped

by men whose names have long since vanished.
…
That is legacy.
Not merely being remembered,

but continuing invisibly

through the lives of others.
…
And I have come to believe

a person is not so different from an empire.
What I build may one day fade.

The titles,
the victories,
the monuments; 

all of them belong eventually to silence.
…

But perhaps character survives differently.
A word spoken at the right moment.

A kindness carried forward by another person.

A standard refused to collapse.

A discipline passed quietly between generations

like fire protected from the wind.
…
To remain myself amid legacy

is the hardest crown to wear.
Because even empires often lose their soul

the moment they become immortal.
As power tempts a person

to become a monument to their own name, 

and monuments do not grow.

They only erode.
…
So I learn instead from the chestnut tree: 

grow wide, 
give shelter, 

to endure without hardening, 

to grow wide without losing my roots, 

to renew after every wound, 

and to leave behind something living
rather than something merely admired.
…
If history remembers anything worthy of me, 

let it not be that I sought immortality.
Let it be that,
like those ancient trees, 

I remained standing through changing ages, 

still giving shelter long after
the empire of my own life had passed.
……