Classic Poem

That here the Age of Belief ends
on the point of a goose quill
and the Age of reason—secular,
continental—is open for business …

Gentlemen, Fathers, Founders,
a belated point: We must note
that belief in the power of Reason
as supreme and optimal arbiter
in human affairs is belief still.
It's the old curse of mathematics:
No system can prove those axioms
on which it rests as a system.
You would answer: Two hundred years
of freedom is proof enough. However
certain free men—the black
hunters of the valleys of the Niger,
the red hunters of the Alleghenies,
who did not segregate Reason
from clouds, mountains, storms,
totems, and the deeds of their fathers—you
deemed part of “mere brute creation”. …

It is still adjudged reasonable
to have founded the federal structure
on a human atrocity—black
slavery—never once mentioned lest
half the founders walk out. But Reason
cannot include that courtesy
among the blessings of liberty. Gentlemen,
what's done is done, whether in passion,
in belief, or in reason. The point
is epistemological: Liberty?
Whose Liberty? And to do what? And Reason?
Who's to say what is reasonable
and who to deny it? The system
can't prove itself; only approve.











By permission of the author.