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Biodegradable Souls

Peccavi


Latin: "I have sinned."


When he was young, he did small wicked foolish things

That burden him now, sixty years later,

Although the world might consider them merely venial—

Commonplace, of scant importance.

If he could change one thing, these he'd undo.

But they’ll haunt him till the end of his days, spilt milk,

Unless he embrace the one and only solution

He can perceive, through the anguish of that old guilt,

And beg forgiveness for all the sins of others, too.


Poor Me!

 

Much of her memory’s a work of fiction—

The novelistic genre called “Poor Me!”

More poignant than postmodernism (though not, perhaps, "post-post")

Its romans à clef depict the past as toast,

Assigning to a junk room family oubliette

Countless bites and pieces one’d rather now forget!

 

Reality

 

This is the real world:

The mogul in his mansion

Paid for by domestic munitions,

The bomber at his bombsight

The Nazi in his tank;

The bacon-eating billions,

Whose "human, all-too-human," biodegradable souls, unthinking

Savour the fruit of untold animal suffering,

Oblivious of our sacred sapient task—

These must, alas, all be forgiven, too?


O God of myriad gods, but it’s a lot to ask!


Alexander Aguin, Plyushkin, an illustration for Nikolai Gogol's 1842 novel Dead Souls—a character whose name in Russia is a metaphor for compulsive hoarding.

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Photo by Peter Dreyer

 Cyclops by Christos Saccopoulos, used by kind permission of the sculptor.

Copyright © 2023 - by Peter Dreyer

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