How Best Can We Remember We Were Slaves

Music: Concerto Grosso in G minor, 1st Movement.
By Arcangelo Corelli.
Performed by the Advent Orchestra at Free Music Archive
under a Attribution-Share Alike License.

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Nicholas Gordon

How best can we remember we were slaves?
After all, it's been three thousand years.
Perhaps in time the ceremony paves
Pleasingly the terrace of our tears.
Yet it happened once, this morning myth,
Past the open window of the wound,
And again, and yet again, the truth
Still streaming from the altars of the doomed.
So must we be the slaves of our own time,
Our holocaust the holocaust of all,
Victorious only when the ancient crime
Exists alone as ritual and rhyme,
Remnants of a myth beyond recall.

Copyright by Nicholas Gordon. Free for personal or non-commercial use.

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