The End of Genghis Khan

The Mongol hordes overrun Khurasan,

Burning crops, razing cities, slaughtering populations.

Returning home along the path of his invasion,

Genghis Khan pauses to erect a stone pillar

And dictate the inscription:

“I turn to simplicity; I turn again to purity.”


Jebe Noyan and Subedei Bahadur

Dine on a box-shaped table in camp,

The Prince of Kiev suffocating to death inside it.


At winter’s onset, in peacetime, the Great Hunt begins:

The entire army, at a signal from the Khan,

Canters forward, in battle array,

For three months on horseback,

Driving the game relentlessly before them.

Bone-chafed, weather-drenched and sore,

The army’s wings advance in harmony,

Slowly closing to encircle the prey,

Until the two ends meet, and the circle contracts

Like a whitehot horsehoe quenched in water.

Terrified animals by the thousand

Are herded together, trapped in the killing zone,

Not a single beast, big or small, permitted to escape,

On the last day, seeking to outdo one another

In the eyes of their comrades, and their Khan,

Men fight with sword or hunt on foot,

And throw themselves into danger,

So that some even die wrestling tigers barehanded.


Troubled by ill omens, the Great Khan

Sets out to avenge himself on the insolent Tanguts.

Out hunting, during the campaign,,

He tumbles from his mount,

But carries on, hiding the haemorrhage pain in his guts.

Weaker and weaker, through narrowed eyes,

He watches his soldiers lay waste to the land,

Soothed, as always, by the smell of destruction.

On the frozen banks of the flooded Yellow River,

The Tangut cavalry, charging headlong,

Slide haywire, crashing, jumbled in heaps,

Taken in the flank and massacred

By the dauntless Mongols, their horses shod with felt,

And lavish crimson smears the ice.


Shrouded in furs, huddled, shivering in his tent,

Genghis, delirious and despairing,

Cries out to any who will hear:

“My descendants will wear gold

And eat the choicest meats;

They will ride the finest horses,

Hold in their arms the loveliest women,

Forgetting to whom they owe it all.”

He repeats to his sons the fable

Of the snake with many heads that argued amongst themselves;

He reminds them that one arrow is easily broken,

But a bundle of arrows never.

Soon afterwards he died.

In fertile mountains, where three rivers start,

In a few years the great leader’s grave was overgrown and forgotten,

And who now even remembers which peak it was on?