I habitually check one or another “day in history” website each morning, perhaps to provide some context for the seemingly random events of the day to come. More often than not, the entries are dominated by obscure battles that may have mattered at the time, but grow increasingly forgotten in the wake of later conflagrations, which also soon enough follow suit.
The news for now, of course, is of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an act that now seems brutally medieval, and by any measure should be in a time when we are more interdependent than ever and in a world which we have laid waste to and should be working together to save.
I our own country the voices of some seem to loudly call for tearing down all we’ve built, rather than let anyone prosper, when once they asked simply for a fair chance at some prosperity.
These thoughts converged into a short poem of sorts that I’ve posted below. It is not meant to be resigned, but instead to reflect on what we can yet and must together become.
What is the Point of a Poem in a time of bloodshed man against mankind a zero-sum game that is anything but a game while the world burns with greed and neglect as if climbing over the dying to be the last to perish is somehow to win? "If I am to die" they reason if such a word could apply "I will take all with me" though surviving would surely be the greater curse being left to rue and mourn alone with the memory of what was once at least an unsettled peace of a sort. What then is the point of anything if we are to become but madness and death and destruction and what of a poem in these end of days unless perhaps at least and last to pen one final epitaph for all we once might have been?
