Grief, smallpox, and poetry

"Broken spears lie in the roads;
We have torn our hair in our grief.
The houses are roofless now...
And the walls are splattered with gore...
We have pounded our hands in despair
Against the adobe walls."

- An Aztec wrote this.
That's one of the most civilized ways of expressing oneself.
It might even make a nice poem nowadays.

What does it say about Aztec?
What does it say about us, Europeans?


As one historian cleverly pointed out, it takes something else for every student to become interested in history.
Honestly, this little piece of writing made me care about Aztecs way more than anything else ever did.