History Repeats

You feel the pain so deeply

It stabs you through the heart

To you, the dark apocalypse

To them, a work of art

And art is imitating life

It’s raw and unrehearsed

Life isn’t getting better here

We fear it’s getting worse

With powers of ascension

Through shadows of regret

And echoes of atrocities

That we cannot forget

Nor should they be forgotten

For how else can we learn?

Deny the evils of the past

Then watch us crash and burn

And not just ‘crash and burn’ my child

But ‘crash and burn again’

Just let us break the cycle now

For if not now, then when?

A brief note

Lately, I have been sitting with the notion that humans learn nothing, or indeed, very little from history. Patterns and cycles repeat time and time again while lessons (and teachers) of the past are looking us in the eye. We cannot hope to learn from the past if we ignore it. It is only by acknowledging the damage caused by our predecessors that we can hope to better ourselves. This, much like therapy, requires a degree of honesty and introspection and neither of these is necessarily comfortable in this context. I, for one, would prefer to be uncomfortable in the pursuit of bettering myself over being complacent and allowing the world to fall apart around me.