Nine stanzas, three short lines each, and nearly every one ends on a word that drops like a stone: "Fiction." "Nightmares." "Ashes." In "Stepping stones," Asta La Vista Baby (a byline that sounds like a breezy goodbye, and may well be a pen name) argues that everything we call civilization rests on the dead, and that we keep climbing without looking down.
The poem starts among things we are taught to admire: a jade stone, engravings, predictions. Judging by the imagery, these are carved, monumental objects, the kind kept in museums or revered as sacred. Then the poem undermines them. "Prophecies, / Holding only, / Fiction." The line break after "only" makes the reader wait, and what arrives is a deflation. The next stanza does the same to art: "Masterpieces, / Based on, / Nightmares." Each stanza strips another layer of glamour, until soldiers are shown "Parading, / On corpses," and the poem has moved from the carved wall to the battlefield.
The grammar is part of the argument. The first three stanzas are lists of nouns with no real verbs, like an inventory. When verbs do arrive, they are participles with nobody attached: "A city built," "Dead used." No one builds the city, and no one uses the dead. The violence happens, but no agent is named, which is how a triumphant history often remembers it. Then the poem pulls the speaker in with one small word: the dead are "our new / Foundations." The guilt belongs to "us."
The poem's most careful construction is its chain of repetitions. "Skulls turn / To dust, / And earth" is followed immediately by "Earth used / To grow food / And hold warmth." The word "earth" is handed from one stanza to the next like a baton, and "used" returns from "Dead used," so the reader hears the cycle as well as understanding it: bodies become soil, soil becomes food, food becomes us. "Hold warmth" is the most unsettling phrase in the poem because it is tender. Even our comfort, the poem suggests, comes out of death.
There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines run two to four syllables, with two or three stresses at most, and the flatness works in the poem's favor, since the statements sound like facts rather than complaints. A phrase like "Jade stone," with its two heavy beats side by side, slows the opening to a deliberate step. Because the lines are so short, the poem also looks like a staircase on the page, and the reader descends it stanza by stanza while the speech keeps talking about climbing. The title feeds this irony. Stepping stones usually mean safe passage across water, but here the stones are "The heads of / The long gone." The singular "stone" of the first line has become the plural "stones" of the last, so the monument and the skull turn out to be the same material.
The ending changes the poem's address. After all the noun-lists and passives comes a direct command: "Climb the steps / Of rotten bodies, / To your dirt throne." "Rotten" is blunter than the earlier "ashes" and "dust," which sound clean by comparison. "Throne" promises power, and "dirt" cancels it at once. Since we have just been told that skulls turn to "dust, / And earth," the climber's throne is made of what the climber will become. The command could be bitter sarcasm or a plain description of how ambition works, and the poem does not say which, nor whether we should stop climbing.
The poem is significant for how much it fits into so little space. It names no particular war, empire or city, so it speaks about all of them, though that also means its argument stays general. What it does well is make an idea that could sound like a sermon feel physical. By the final stanza the reader has been walked step by step from admired objects to bodies, and then asked to stand on them.