Confucius Say . . .
02 June 2021 Wednesday Prose Poem: major philosophy
Confucius say … break open the cookie
Reveal the truth, then pay the tab.
Christ, we’ve missed the point — we’ve missed
the reason — all those dreams that came undone.
In the years since it was uttered,
all the lives we drove asunder
Three thousand wishes and we’ve yet begun.
Three thousand years and still we wonder,
The simple truth was all that mattered
Do not do to others, what you do not wish done to you.
I broke open my first fortune cookie over 60 years ago and it began, Confucius say . . . I didn’t know who he was until much later. Sometimes society misses the point completely. We relegate wisdom to fortune cookie status and drive hundreds of miles to listen to the twisted rhetoric of a shyster in a red baseball cap. There’s a life lesson in this somewhere — perhaps the next cookie will give me a clue.
Thanks, J.D. Harms for the prompt.
