My heart is lying where the seeds are blown

I am trying to examine my very hard recoil from Angela Leighton's "Phoenician." Much of it may boil down to the author's self-acknowledged appropriation of the grimacing terracotta mask for the purposes of modern metaphor, since there is little archaeological reason to believe these items—mass-produced in Carthage, often discovered in graves of Phoenician cities and colonies around the coastline of the Mediterranean—were employed in so grotesque a fashion as the poet depicts:

Hard to relate if they burned their children alive

all smiling, smiling in masks to pleasure a god
who'd thus not see their terror or hear their cries

but accept the sacrifice: the life's soft parts
disguised by that hard laughter baked to last.

The poem is devastatingly effective on its own terms, sardonic and brutal as its key icon. But isn't it painful enough to imagine the willingness to reduce one's own children, generation after generation, to a tophet of calcined bones? Does it have to be envisioned with a flamboyant cruelty out of Flaubert? Of course the poem wraps around to the recognition that we in the present day sanction the deaths of children by fire from no higher moral ground than the ancient civilization we comfortably disparage, masking the horror for ourselves with euphemisms instead of blood-kilned clay, but then it isn't our children burning in the poem, is it?

(Their alphabet is ours).

Collateral. (Think — a smokescreen.) Are we blind, by half?
The drones we make explode elsewhere in fires.

I know it doesn't matter to the metaphor, the indictment of hypocrisy: that so long as something screens the eye from the truth of children dying in agony, we have no compunctions about stoking the fires. But it matters to the history. Without relitigating the evidence of the tophets, Carthage deployed as the metonym for human sacrifice twinges with me because it is so much a part of the Greek and Roman filter which we inherit just as surely as the transformations of the Phoenician alphabet, that ultimately Other city in the irresistible binaries of east/west female/male barbarity/civilization which mythologically exists for its own destruction by which the inevitability of empire may be upheld. As if we could have come by this propensity for blood-guilt through no other tradition, as if in reaching back from A to 𐤀 we wouldn't stumble over the bodies of gladiators, offered just as urbanely to the di manes instead of 𐤕𐤍𐤕 𐤐𐤍 𐤁𐤏𐤋 and 𐤁𐤏𐤋 𐤇𐤌𐤍. Go back beyond aleph and you can sort through the smashed skulls of the retainers of Ur. In full disclosure, I have written more than one Carthaginian poem myself and most of them at least allude to this question. The author writes gorgeously about the ancient world and is no doubt aware of every relevant point about the prevalence of human sacrifice within it. I am just left agreeing with the poem that whatever we define as civilization has never precluded what we decry as uncivilized and still feeling it does itself no favors with the invented monstrosity of its comparison. Besides, while I recognize it misses what I interpret as the political impetus for the poem, we have never needed to look elsewhere for the licensed deaths of children. In this country, the cover-up is thoughts and prayers.