Probably wrote this while studying world history and reading Oliver Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village.” Except this one wasn’t an assignment. 🙂
Here’s more thoughts from a schoolgirl, the “pink sticky note poem” typed.
Civilization
Each empire has its tyranny,
Each empire has its slaves.
To no avail each empire climbs–
No empire will be saved.
Mighty Rome!
Her roads and conquest
Fell at barbarian hands
And into darkness long
Was plunged, ’til kings
Should rule again.
A civilization thinks it’s new,
Yet mirrors all the past.
The things it knows
Will come and go,
Like dew upon the grass.
Though each to permanency strives,
Only the cycle lasts.
From Babylon and Egypt,
To Persia, Greece, and Rome–
All across the continents,
Empires have grown.
All thinking themselves walled in stone,
The folly herein lies:
No civilization standing now
Will heed the ancient cries–
“You will fall, just like the rest,
So wake from your blind pride.”
She doesn’t hear until duress,
And then, alas, she dies.
We see the dreadful pattern;
We cannot find its cure.
We do not heed the trap at first,
Enchanted by its lure.
And, oh, of the life pastoral,
Of the joy of simpler times!
We would have stayed in fairer climes
Had empire not appeal.
And so we feed the monster,
And gild it with our work.
But small it starts, delights us,
We’re giddy in our mirth
Until it turns and strikes us,
Slinks off to seek rebirth.
Each civilization has its glories,
But all the more its faults.
We look to the past stories,
But we cannot make it halt.
You see, my friend, because we err,
There is no paradise
Until through death we become heirs
To our eternal life.
All that on two sticky notes! I think I’d better keep them for proof. 😉