Miss World: Beauty Contest

Their gowns fold and flatten like water
on their consummate columns as they go,
the paragons and apples of their race.
Their nacreous smiles insist like a tattoo.

A triumvirate once of the earth’s best
posed before Paris, and all that nudity
traversed, he gave Love’s queen the fruit
whose virus sapped heroic energy

but made song. Being human what they give
is ballyhoo whose epic emptiness
they sustain like caryatids and drilled
and beautiful by numbers, take the stress.

They must have sweated while their symmetries
were totted up until the satellites
and the globe were batonned into being
and a lissom cosmos stepped out in tights.

She fanfares her smiles to the audience.
Hector’s head once trundled like a can
about a doomed circuit, and heaps of men
keeled over. Her beauty will kill no man.

Hera, Athene, raged; man-slaying beauty
was more than Asia, genius in war.
Denmark is rueful, India communes,
A hot hate goes home to Ecuador.

Her Homers will be hacks. She’ll cool off
among the spent metal of out stars
who’ll reminisce about a brief empire
and re-fight their old cosmetic wars.