Brian’sPoems

Enlightenment

A poem seeking existential growth...

In those terrible days
when childbirth was a death sentence,
uncertainty loomed like a starless night,
and there appeared to be little hope
for anything more
than our lot in life merited,
the Enlightenment,
with its most enlightened ways,
must've at first seemed
like a welcome invader.

But to those a little more worldly,
the Enlightenment must've been
almost an inevitability,
building upon the Magna Carta,
which would inspire the U.S. Constitution
and the Bill of Rights –
documents setting men free
to test the limits of human ego.

In these terrible days
when some measure of human life
is all but guaranteed,
like funds for the defense budget,
and there seems to be no coherence
in our endless streams of data
or in the reasons we sold our humanity
to the billionaire bidders,
maybe it's time for us to revisit
our most-enlightened ways
by accepting the world we’ve constructed
as the well-lit prison cell
we all desire it be.