The Seeds of Time (poem)

By Luke Labern

The milk of human kindness flows too freely here:
Too constant, where brutality is too brittle.
The unkind face, as told by my skeleton,
Hides the deeper truth. I am not here for you.
No validation can you provide for work
You do not notice, and cannot process.
Yet still I seek it, despite my better nature.
I hate you, who decreed kindness a virtue:
If you had known how weak you would make men,
Would you still have written the lie?
It is left to brave men to expose it.
In doing so, they are exposed to twin punishment:
Forced labour, unsighted, married to criticism
From every quarter—even the fifth.
You unreal aliens, who do not belong.
And in this lies the real poison of history—
We treat the excrement of time as culture.

There is nothing worse, save faded love
And jaded age, than the tight grip
Of the past on the creative imagination.
I hate the dead who lie on top of me;
Just to move my hand is a strain:
Try to keep your eyes open in the rain
And dry them with wet wrists.
Such is the likelihood of unencumbered ambition
So many years down the line from your mistakes.
Worse still that many dead are as yet living.

Who is to blame for the wasted seeds of time?
Who will take the fall for the deification of kindness
In a world where true strength is universal moral blindness?