Truth

“Truth is like fire; to tell the truth means to glow and burn.”

—Gustav Klimt, Nuda Veritas (1899)

Truth, I'd say, is more like a foxed mirror

In a dusty, cluttered attic corner

Of an imagined ancestral homeland—

A beaten country that lost its Great War.

Or like a painting of a nonentity called “Me”

Who slinks around a corner in the Goodwill store,

And then (hopefully?) is spotted no more.

Its kindling might get clearer by and by,

It is the flames one cannot falsify.

Telling is—inevitably, I guess!—to lie.

Saturday, February 8, 2025