Ekphrasis Upon La Gran Tenochtitlan

What do I know of your world? I read about your people on the subway train, To marvel at how so much was lost, All because a handful of men wanted gold, Five hundred years ago, You’re there, in every book about the Aztecs, Sometimes they crop the image to focus on you, Sometimes they don’t, But it still seems like you're at the center of the world, Though you are in the bottom-right of a mural, And the canals glisten in the Venice of the Americas, The temple with its twin shrines rises like a mountain, The market bustles with merchants, farmers, warriors, nobles, with turquoise beads, quetzal plumes and jaguar pelts, In a city so beautiful it made the conquistadors pinch themselves, To check if they were dreaming, And they complained of a disease of the heart that could only be cured by gold, You are the jewel of the New World, With aromatic white flowers in your hair, And your lips bright red, The painter has made you lift the hem of your dress, Revealing your tattooed leg, We can tell what power you hold by this hint, and what we can see from following your gaze, The way you focus on the emperor in his palanquin, In your world, I would have been a slave, Falling horribly, devastatingly, catastrophically in love, If you are a woman, then I must not be one, Or I may be like those cloistered nuns in Spain, I have felt like those jaguar knights who fell at your feet did, Those eagle knights whom you robbed of a warrior’s death, For their heart was torn out before they could reach the sacrificial altar, When a butcher offers you a severed human arm in the market, You do not acknowledge his lowly existence, You are thinking of ways to elevate your status, What flashes in your obsidian eyes is not love but ambition