Two Books
by Benjamin Dodds from Australian Reader.com
If a strange and sudden amnesia
were to befall us all
and a fresh new generation,
true tabula rasa children,
sired of ultimate innocence
were to rise,
they would laugh
and shake their bell-clear heads
to read dusty tales of risen corpses
and disproportionate paternal anger
over stolen fruit.
And down the years
when one of them unsure
took up an old book
from which he began to glean a trust
in the idea of a lonely being
who created man
exactly as he still appeared,
who drowned all but two
of every kind,
and who still monitored silently
from a lofty hiding spot
keeping daily scores for all,
the others would set this person down
and hand him another book,
one which was not yet written
when our own antecedents
first entertained such obtuse ideas.
Therein he would find
unshakeable solace
in the knowledge that
of all possible permutations
of individual life,
his own came about
when uncountable others did not.
Seek awe in that,
and he need never seek it
elsewhere again.
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