Poems

Here's a poem - I'm finally getting at least something up. The main concern of the poem is essentially that of evil. If, as John Donne wrote, "no man is an island" and suffers death just as much as the man who actually dies, then he is also the murderer just as much as the man who murders. There are several references to famous treatments of this theme throughout, but I'll leave my own comments at that unless anyone has questions.

I hear the bells now ringing,
Decrying the wrongs of man,
I hear the mournful singing,
Asking why the world is so.
The truth we do avoid,
But in seeking ye shall know.

We do not want to know
That Man's wrongs are his own.
Against dark tides, we rage
Against the dying of the light
Of something nobler
Than Man.

Would you ask a fox,
"Why are you so cruel?"
Is not man an animal, too?
Then do not ask him the same.
He hides his nature well,
Beneath a sly deceptive coat.

Do we not see that to man
Violence is delightful,
Self-absorption righteous?
Tears come to the eyes of good men
When they discover who man is,
For noone lives alone.

You are a man? Take then your inheritance!
Clasp to your chest your heart of darkness!
The slaughter of the natives
Is ours just as the Fourth of July,
Nazi Germany as much
As Periclean Athens.

Man has done it all.
Our souls writhe when a man is cruel.
"No man is an island."
We would never do that...
But neither would they
Who only followed orders.

These things lie dormant,
These things like deep within,
Buried in a case of self-deception,
Behind our self-denial.
At the root of who man is.
"You are that man."

Cry, man, when you discover who you are,
For it is said, learning who man is.
Cruelty does not occur accidentally in this world.
Feel compassion for yourself, man.
For the world's suffering
Weighs down on you as well.