HISTORY UNBOUND

Thick history books sit on the table,

Cardboard covers worn thin,

Pages stained with dirty fingers or

Torn out and tucked back in, unbound,

As if names, dates, places, and events

Had escaped their encrypted forms. 

Re-creations abound.   Living museums,

reenactments, and preservation sites

bring the dead back to life;

costumes and scenery resurrect the old days,

as if there were a lesson to be learned,

as if we might decipher what had passed.

Despite faded photographs, broken artifacts,

fragile films, and second-hand memories;

Despite images of blood and suffering,

We think we celebrate the heroic,

We think we expose and defeat the fiends,

We think we bury them in heavy tomes.

Until they rise again, crawl out of the woodwork,

Seep like wet ink onto new pages of history,

Appear as new faces, chant the same siren songs,

Speak the same words slightly shuffled,

Employ the same hobbled strategies

Reenacted along the same lines,

Unbound, new chapters

Read the same as all the ones before. 

©cmheuer, July, 2017