Many of you will know the poems of fellow Quaker Dana Littlepage Smith from The Friend or elsewhere. This is a poem from her book What Love Requires, published by Overstep Books, and seems to me to capture the tragedy of the culture of lies that dominates current politics, and their devastating consequences. Dana was very happy to share it with us all.
Juliet Henderson
Lies
Dana Littlepage Smith
Falsehood flies, and Truth comes limping after it…
Jonathan Swift, 1710
The lies came easily
at the end, as easily
as fire counterfeiting light
until it swallowed
darkness. As easily
as darkness sexing
a starless sky into night.
Other were noble lies
which fell like Plato’s rain
engendering the social
harmony: dissimulators
until the end of time.
But no one knew
where the roots,
the steadfast ones,
had burrowed
in our post-truth world.
Light seemed to slip away.
some said it illumined …
All the while, the lies
came fast as funerals
for glaciers. Meltwater
brimmed our eyes.
Truth and beauty
might have blinked as falsehood
danced its thin red line
over the horizon,
The suicides
became fake news.
False witness
worked overtime.
Our blinded eyes
reminded us of something.
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Forty-Three Newsletter • Number 514 • February 2022
Oxford Friends Meeting
43 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LW