History, or An Existential Crisis

Once, the only emotion I would attach

to history was apathy.

But now I know too much

and struggle with the frantic,

crisis-inducing dilemma that wonders if

history is

a feeling itself.

One you come close to touching

in chalkdust from blackboard erasers, clapped

together by uninterested kids. But dust

flees as time does, kissing your knuckles,

never taking your hand.

 

History is,

dare I say, most prominently felt

where Death has reigned,

and the fabric of our candle-lit fantasy

is the thinnest, pressing

dangerously close to a reality

that textbooks could never encompass.

It is there in Dachau

in the form of some thousand held breaths

that slither down your throat like muddy ropes, begging

to be released,

in a final scream that has been held too long.

But tightrope silence is adhered to

and if history tries to take your hand here,

it brushes your neck instead,

sends a dying whimper down your spine.

I miss my aforementioned apathy.

 

History is

An infuriatingly impossible feeling.

Perhaps that is why we romanticize the subject--

do palace walls recall flaws

made by the hands of Renaissance painters,

or were they as untouchably perfect

as the gods they created? Back

and back, before ancient hands

committed memories to stone,

what words were crafted for the wind to carry,

which we will never know?

 

History is

a grandfather clock, looming at the edge

of peripheral vision, almost dismissible

but for the eerie way it watches

and how its hands collect the seconds.