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A dirge

Man has always been like that,
destroying everything and leaving only ruins,
as all history is but a devastation in his trail,
like all the broken pillars around the Mediterranean
bearing witness of his progress as immortal testimonies
of the human berserk meaningless mentality
in hopelessly shortsighted egoism
and superficial ignorance and blindness,
thinking only of the killing of the moment
as a pastime in hysterically chasing vanity and death.
Those who refused to share this madness, seeing through
the cruel animality of man possessed by carnal lust
and therefore chose detachment from that lemming fever
in refusal to have anything to do with human folly,
were despised and chased and persecuted,
hounded often unto loneliness in exile if not death
as outsiders, free-thinkers and heretics,
forced to constant struggle of resistance to survive,
like Dante in his nineteen years of exile
and the Shakespeare poet forced to lifelong anonymity,
as even wise old Plato in his high philosophy
denounced and sentenced poets such as Homer
as not tolerable in society,
thus signing the death sentence of his own civilization,
since the Homer poems had created it;
but all these scrapped rejected prophets
that so often were mishandled and buried alive
were witnesses that never could be silenced
not even by death, as they were always right,
while history was always wrong,
as constantly the ruins of politics proved,
which is what history is all about.

Poetry by Christian Lanciai