An Unkindness of Ravens

Johann Jakob Schlesinger, portrait of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1831). Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.

—C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (1956)

That’s one of the things we don’t learn from history,

Abstracting hallucinations for the by-and-by.

Hegel always bites off much more than he can chew,

And C. Wright Mills couldn't resist grand theory.

History’s better than a best-selling novel,

Do and die not recognizing a reason why:

In the end even the greatest crackpots groveled.

Faced with Nature’s late post-saurian mystery,

Predictably, in a quotidian of fouls,

An unkindness of ravens trumps a parliament of owls.

Thursday, July 10, 2025

Sine die

A page from the manuscript of Alfred Nobel's play Nemesis

Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s.—Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side

Poets, I think, are more interesting than politicians

and far less biased. More interesting than economists, too

(though an economist may be a poet as well—Keynes was, I think),

Poets keep their options open, if they’re any good.

The solution to the world’s problems might well be a government of them!

They spring up from the most unlikely roots:

Alfred Nobel invented dynamite,

gelignite, and ballistite, grew rich selling Bofors guns, and naval mines.

He'd rather have been a poet, though, and shortly before dying, went to Italy

and wrote a four-act tragedy based on the story of Beatrice Cenci,

sixteenth-century executed murderer of the count, her rapist father.

Filled with remorse, and not wishing to be remembered as a merchant of death,

Nobel bequeathed the world his contentious set of prizes.

It’s said that these cause more trouble than they’re worth, but who knows.

Since the rules for poets are tabled, sine die.*

There’s telling who might be one.

Maybe even you and me.

*I.e., indefinitely.

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Dear Diary . . .

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."—Oscar Wilde,The Importance of Being Earnest

These writings are a make-shift diary

of imaginings sensational and truth

to see me out the steampunk journey

begun in the Mzansi of my youth,

when the bad old world stood on its feet

and never thought it could be beat.

Anglophones don't read Chaucer

or Shakespeare any more,

lacking their vocabulary.

In Paris, off the Champs-Elysées,

theaters close on soon-forgotten plays.

Even the Comédie Française

has seen, they say, far better days.

In Moscow, Chekhov and Pushkin are shills

in Putin's filthy test of wills.

Ancient Greek is today's Greek

students' least favorite branch of knowledge.

It's not for that they go to college—

tales of old Athens in Thucydides

send them sighing to phone trees.

All this sensational, of course, you know?

A traveler's train is ever so.

Monday, July 7, 2025