THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION

The following poem, as should be clear from the title, riffs on a famous quotation from Yahweh in the Old Testament/Tanakh. It also references a fairly famous saying of Jesus, one of Tolstoy and one of Wordsworth, concluding with Herbert Spencer.

THE THIRD AND FOURTH GENERATION

There is no sin,

As we have no gods to offend,

But offenses there are,

One human to another, in great regularity.

The offensiveness of familiarity

Nests above all in families dysfunctional,

Each alike in their own different way.

No gods need destroy, nor drive mad,

Those who burden themselves

And their descendants,

Unto the third and fourth generations,

With false guilt, shame, anxiety and worse.

Rather than the elders

Being weighted with millstones

And cast into the sea,

The thrust off these crushing weights

Onto the necks of the weaker and younger

Of their own households and families.

Social Darwinism starts at home.

            — Feb. 14, 2015