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A History of Knowing

The soul advances, the soul is trampling the universe.

Poetry | Poetry Tuesday, poetry
November 8, 2022

Butterflies do not fly unless there is sunlight.
Neither do wasps. So I think Basho is a fool,
or what’s left of him. My god is made from paper tonight, or so he hopes.

I heard you were writing me a letter. Not a postcard, but a treaty.
Pity. People say, write him a letter because he won’t listen.
Make him read. Let the words stay in the world like a trampling.

I am taking my time apart like a cicada. God knows how many years.
Some years are older than centuries — but they still die just the same,
they break apart when you pull it. So pull it, like a thread from the folk lore.

Butterflies do not fly unless there is sunlight.
On the news, scientists tell me the universe is growing more violent.
Where, there. The soul advances, the soul is trampling the universe.

So what would Whitman even say, with his little words about the grass.
Even the grass is angry. The old poems have been dead.
The old poems are no longer possible.

Year 1917, two lovers in Vienna met and said,
we hope this misery never happens again. But that was then.
A lie is now technologically advanced. A lie is now progress.

My mother says, at night, the hornets will be sleeping in a nest,
under the earth.
I watch a tutorial on how to kill wasps.
Turn a bottle of gasoline upside-down, and drive it into the hole.
Oh night, how bountiful we all are, when we cannot see.