Yesterday, the first day of National Poetry Month, our assignment at LegendFire was to write our own found poem. I chose a book at random off my shelves, and it happened to be a short collection of Plato's writings. I cracked it open and read, "He says he knows how the youth are corrupted and who are their corruptors." Well, if that is not inspiration for a poignant poem, I don't know what is. So I kept gathering lines that I had underlined in college, and here are the results:
APOLOGY*
Someone has been
prosecuting you?
He must be a wise man
The charge?
That I am a poet or a maker of gods.
He says he knows how the youth are
corrupted and who are their corruptors.
He must be a wise man.
The youth like to hear the pretenders examined;
they do not like to confess that their
pretense of knowledge has been detected.
He must be a wise man.
Happy the condition of youth if
if
if they had only one corruptor
and all the rest of the world
were their improvers.
He must be a wise man.
The sign he
ridicules?
A voice
which comes to me and forbids
but never commands,
and this is what stands in the way.
The truth is that only God is wise;
in this oracle he means to say:
the wisdom of men is little or nothing.
I should have perished long ago,
done no good either to you or myself.
I cared not a straw for death
my only fear was of doing an unrighteous thing.
The difficulty is not avoiding death, but avoiding
unrighteousness.
I would fain prophesy to you:
There is reason to hope that death is
a good. Either
death is a state of nothingness, or
there is a migration of the
soul from this world
to another.
The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways.
I to die, and you to live.
Which is better,
God only knows.
*taken from Euthyphro
and Apology by Plato
.
