A series of quiet catastrophes unfolds. Wheat soil slides downhill into the sea, a masked priest becomes a bird, people who once bowed in the markets turn into weeds, and a wine-carrying galley sinks in the harbour. Each image shows something fertile, sacred, or social losing its human shape and becoming remote, inert, or sunken. The feeling is not explosive but inevitable: a whole world is thinning out, returning to mud, stone, water, and weed.
Against this decline, the King and Queen remain. They rule over a “dark nation of thrones,” yet they have become as still as a river building a delta. The speaker’s tone is calm and almost ritualistic, while the mood is eerie and mournful. The final image implies that power can outlast the life it once governed, leaving only empty symbols and a slow, geological silence.