BUT IN THE END...

Moses and Hammurabi told us

how to live. The Bible, the Upanishads,

Buddha, and the others opened windows

to God, so we could see past ourselves

and search the universe to know 

why water is not as thick as 

blood.

The Greeks woke up, looked around

and showed us the questions begging 

answers; taught us to wonder who

and why? The Parthenon with it’s

bow-edged pillars still stands

for something deep in our

psyche.

The pyramids wrote our signature in

the sand when we had not yet learned the

meaning of hubris. What a joke we

make of ourselves with a desert mountain  

grave we cannot explain and a lion with

the head of a man prone at its feet,

waiting.

Our kings, greedy for land, power,

and concubines made war our

primary game to this day, and leave

nothing more than bloody bootprints

in the wreckage behind, but like

the rest of us, they just come and

go.

When I consider those who

looked up, and hear their

Gregorian chants, see the Pieta,

anything Da Vinci touched, watch

Shakespeare point his finger

in the face of our sound and fury,

listen to Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms,

I’m a little better acquainted with

beauty.

In my personal sensory overload,

I know why I like Georgia O'Keeffe and

Auguste Rodin, the rhythmic moan of

John Lee Hooker, reading

D. H. Lawrence or Bukowski, and why,

in the world of me, I need to look

back.

With all of that, we are still ignorant

as those neolithics, terrified of

everything, because they knew 

the gods must be crazy. At their 

huddled breakfast they grunted

about what to eat, their menu 

painted deliciously on the cave 

wall. 

So here we sit, proud and 

comfortable, superstition usurped 

by a science that cannot explain the

simple spark of life determined to

find a way across the laboratory floor, 

dodging our feeble efforts to explain 

how its bits and pieces came to

be.

Reviews

[Lorry]

It is amazing when you think about all that man has achieved since dragging our sorry arses from the caves, right up to the here and now of Mars missions and constant entertainment being but a click or voice command away. Yet even with the vast wealth of others who paved the way and knowledge being so abundantly available to us all, we may some day get to the point where we acknowledge that despite what we know, it is but a fraction of what we do not know, at least for now.
As I said, it is amazing everything we have already achieved, but why the hell does it still take a workman two weeks to fix a leaky faucet tap? Or why has the cold not been cured, seeing as it's so common?
Or why can't we live in a more environmentally friendly way of harnessing solar power or even the power from wind or waves... Or failing that, why can't we heat our homes from the temperature of a McDonald's hot apple pie?
And here's me wondering why I'm still awake at 12:40 in the ayem! 😊

[Vol]

Lorry,
I just looked it up again... the first time I heard about this, all human knowledge doubled for the first time in the late 1800s; now it does every 18 months... far faster than the human psyche can assimilate and cope. From what I see these days, many young folks in America actually believe it is possible to have "superpowers," and that magic is real... Carl Sagan talked about that as a likely outcome of our ineffective educational system.
For now, I'm just sitting here in the middle of nowhere watching the world go to hell in a rusty bucket. And I'm an optimist...
Vol

[Lorry]

But even optimists have to be realists too Vol. We can only play the cards life deals us, so I'm with you. Especially when you see what passes for a grown adult these days have a hissy fit because they weren't made to feel special enough for some extremely undeserving reason or other.
They probably counted the sprinkles on their madeupacino and felt they never got enough, so are making the baristas day hell by demanding an apology and holding up the ever growing queue.
I actually think we will see in our lifetimes, comedy shows we're the audience actually say the word LOL, rather than laugh! At that moment, I will be COfWSSMTT (crying on floor while somehow still managing to type! 😊