Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.” ― C.S. Lewis,
You are 'Shift'*
you have the power
to bend light
so that there, the far side
is turned away
so that there is no other side:
when you beget
and we forget.
You the shapeshifter
sometimes sidling in
with whisperings of Reason,
freeing speech to the winds
old epithets torn, re-formed
as soundbites
for the somnolent.
Your coils though slowly capture
encirclement as chains
imperceptible
tightening on all the Tellers of our Time
with inversions, perversions
and paradox*
You were there at the beginning
when the world was manifest
as glorious, multifarious.
You are still here, Hegemony
with the power to hold us all
in thrall, to the smallest
one-eyed eidolon
of your dominion
- Shift was a talking Ape, the main antagonist in Lewis’ book ‘The last Battle” (1956) from which the epigraph is taken,
- “The Decline of Freedom of Expression and Social Vulnerability in Western democracy”
- eidolon: An insubstantial manifestation of a person or (occasionally) thing; a spirit, a phantom; an apparition.
For Li’s Poetics Prompt we are writing to the good or evil of Power. I eschew politics in poetry especially when overtly partisan but this is about the struggle we citizens have always had to think for ourselves
PoetryPix 