Saturday, November 30, 2019

Ars Poetica: Histories

Ars Poetica: Histories Revised

A snapshot of past lives with words of poetry

shared styles of writers and poets living and gone
Yet they live on somehow with words that paint pictures
creation of long past worlds,
scenes of town and countryside.

How did the buildings look? What did the people wear?

How they fought, how they loved, and what did they fight for?
Is it just a dream, others past lives and epochs?
Do I see those who suffered?
The victims and predation?

Were writers in the past free to express the truth

or were they required to wear a social mask,
emotions deadened to preserve place and honor,
feelings barely recognized
and quickly turned away from?

Were chroniclers of the past permitted freedom,

writers and poets recording reality
as they lived it, without judgement or prejudice?
What did rulers require of them,
in service only to tribe?

To only present depictions of the good life,

beauty, love, valor of victorious armies?
Was veracity and truth an ideal of value?
Is it true the old adage,
That victors write history?

I fear absence of truth, it makes me feel brainwashed.
Should this trait be retained, nourished, cultivated?
Or is this obsession macabre and sinister?
Does the past even matter-
sleeping dogs be left alone?

The past is gone with no one able to change it.

We can learn, mistakes prevented in our own lives.
We can view the stories as cairns that mark the way.
Don’t fall off the steppingstone!
It is there for a reason!

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