CREDO
I am; we are
A million miles or more from our nearest star.
We absorb us, I absolve me,
Profligate in our insensitivity.
One day I find us sitting with me
At the wrong end of our apple tree.

RESIDUES OF OURSELVES
I am old enough to have known a good many deaths
First and second hand, close and bone-crushingly near.
Sometimes unnoticed for a while, because we only care to feel
People who are habitually near as the residues of ourselves;
Not those who are in the world among their own. Lives entwine
Only to disentangle and distend. We remember the ones who live
And disremember the corpses left behind. Corpses that are
No longer people, and we can betray their memories at will.

And betrayals, in an age of surviving precariously, can be forgiven
As a means of survival. I’ve known a few of those too, situated conveniently
Between simulated affection and awkward indignation, fumbling for reasons,
Justifications sought in quickly-feigned hatreds and dispassionate judgments.
Those who are dead have not betrayed you. Which is probably because
They were gone too soon to do so. And so we mourn them. And fear the living.
STRANGLED HORSES
It’s an ordinary day in an uneven month in the country
Formerly known as Ind. An old man in a prison cell
Reads himself a fairy tale. People say
He was a poet once. But he wrote
In a language no one can read, and
For people who are now long dead.

We remembered him for a minute
In the land we knew as Hind. When
It was time for memories and mourning.
Officially, once a year, or maybe twice,
We remember a poet or a martyr,
And in some years they were the same person.
It wasn’t such a good idea to be a poet, then.
They were liable to cause all kinds of
Misunderstandings. Poets could not be taught
By governments. And governments hired poets once
To write. At the risk that their poetry
Was mistaken for government.

There was a poet once, though, who gave voice to
People whose governments had cause to be uncertain
About who it was, or what it was, that the people
Wanted of them. It’s said he died,
In a year in which the martyr and the poet were
The same person.
And it was a fine old poet that once
Roamed the lands of Hindustan. Had he been
A woman, or oppressed in any other way,
His way with words would be no more majestic
Or alluring. And he spoke to people
He had no right to speak for.
But they say he was a poet. And poets
Have strange rights that they claim
Without their being bestowed upon them.
And in the lands of saffron kings, and
Strangled horses copulating with wailing queens
A weight has been lifted from the conscience
Of all who came to know of themselves as poets
Or as scholars, for them we now know that
Poets, like gods and heroes, and dodos and dinosaurs,
Are either long dead, or are not believed to exist.
And so it is, in the worlds we have known,
That governments have been freed at last.
All Images: Freepik.com
Benjamin Zachariah works at the Georg Eckert Institute for Educational Media in Braunschweig, and with the project on the contemporary history of historiography at the University of Trier. He was trained in the discipline of history in the last decade of the previous century. After an uneventful beginning to a perfectly normal academic career, he began to take an interest in the importance of history outside the circle of professional historians, and the destruction of the profession by the profession. He is interested in the writing and teaching of history and the place of history in the public domain.