Secrets of Sindh

"Civilizations rise and fall, all.
Egypt, Rome, Greece, Babylon, Assyria, Mesopotamia.
Slaves, armies, sieges,
Fiery catapults and captives flayed alive!
Violence by rote,
Conquest by conviction.
Thousands of years of terror,
Millennia of man against man
For ideology or land,
With women and children murdered in the middle.
Is it human nature that tears down
The walls of Jerico or Multan,
Slaughtering all the inhabitants
In the name of religion or obscure cultural allegiances?
Boys are beheaded, their mothers raped
Babies are impaled from Tenochitlan to Taxila.
Desert Prophets,
Regal Monarchs,
Military Rulers.
Imperialistic imperatives
Bringing manacles and massive mayhem.
From time immemorial hate and horror ruled the earth
And guided mankind's interactions.
How then in ancient Sindh were they so confident
In the continuance of their existence
That they built no moats and manufactured no weapons?
3000 years before the common era
In a vast territory the size of Europe
Thrived the Indus Valley Civilization
Where traders and craftsmen and women and children
Worked and played
For more than 20 centuries.
Why were there no weapons?
No ramparts?
No moats?
No fortifications against
Marauding fear?
Why were they so confident?
Given the collective history of the human race.
What was their secret?
How did they order their reality without resorting to arms?
From Persia to Kashmir across the Deccan
Sprawling>br> Interacting
Supplying the world with condiments and cloth.
How they remained thus,
Free from the necessities of warfare,
The bricks, the drains and wells at Mohan -jo-Daro
Cannot tell us.
The recent history of the Indus holds no answers.
But in the soul of Sindh
Beyond all forms of contemporary coercion,
Through the layers of conditioning:
A clearness of intellect holds some primordial clue.
If only the world could understand
The meaning hidden beneath the mounds
In Mohan-jo-Daro."