SELFISH EDUCATION MINUS POETICAL WISDOM
MAKES THE WORLD LAME
Alexander K Opicho
(Eldoret, Kenya; aopicho@yahoo.com)
Nothing is wrong with selfish education;
Career is an important part of a good life
Much of human life over the years
Is devoted to career acquisition
In oblivion of poetical wisdom
Philosophy does not make it any easier,ok
For apothecaries to remove a prostate gland;
Apothecarical education is long, arduous and dear in cost
Never temper it with apparent irrelevance
But poetical wisdom soothes the tools
Helps apothecaries to volite in dilemma
Poetical wisdom is essential for apothecary’s work
Without it; apothecary tells a mother-to-be
Your baby will be a dwarf dwarfishly
The apothecary explains the mother’s options yet in fault
Since it takes more than just knowledge of genetics
Since it requires an understanding of suffering,
Of disappointment and puerperal attachment
Apothecary tell a daughter but in sham; that
Your mother’s life support needs to be removed
It takes more than just knowledge of physiology
It too requires an understanding of emotional loss
A casualty room apothecary goofs to avoid despair
When faced with a baby battered nearly to death
By its own zinjathropus father
Such horror requires a faith in humanity
That cannot be learned in the selfish education
It’s not just apothecaries absolute
To benefit from a broader learning
It is but entire humanity
Studying drama would no help financiers
Devise capricious financial parasites
That doomed the world into financial mire
But, if they were familiar with Faust,
They may have thought twice about
The consequences of their vice,
Being able to sing from Shelley’s poems
Will not help politicians get elected
Carousing Ozymandias might make them more humble
And thoughtful about their accomplishments
Rupert Murdoch might not now be shaking his head
And whining; how I wish I new
Instead, he were to echo Shakespeare’s words
About how easy it is to be; done to death by a slanderous tongue,
I sing this poem in a crouch in the twilight
Around the world as my audience
Behold poetic eyebrows of my comrades,
A generation of humanity familiar poetical kingdoms
Of history, philosophy and literature is a wonderful vision
Doubts not that reading Goethe
And Shelley and Shakespeare guarantees wisdom
You are correct, kudos to you,
Reading, by itself, won’t make anyone a sage
Experience is a pertinent Florence
As Odysseus learns on his journey back to Ithaca,
Important lessons can only be learned the hard way
Through bitter experience, perhaps has a change,
Youth start out with ***, drugs, rock and roll
With experience they eventually emotions decadence
In calm appreciation that; nothing to excess,
Tragic exceptions like poor Amy Wine house;
Only serve to prove the rule, there is a problem,
Ergo, Experience alone cannot guarantee wisdom
Any more than reading books can
The lessons of life are only available
To those who are ready to learn them
If wisdom is the goal, then humanity must walk 10,000 miles,
To read 10,000 books
Said 17th century Chinese philosopher, GU Yanwu
Becoming wise requires more than set of adventures
But a cultured mind that is open and liberal
Readily able to absorb the lessons that experience teaches
Pasteur famously said that; Chance favours the prepared mind
Our job as learning humanity is to take his words seriously
Prepare mankind to learn from experience,
Humanity is to go beyond selfish education
To learn colours of hope in the poetical wisdom;
Life, death, tragedy, love, beauty, courage, loyalty
All of these are omitted from selfish education
yet, when it comes time to sum up our lives,
They are the only things that ever go places,
Catholic priesthood ever admonishes the flocks;
Thou art dust, and to dust thou shalt return
A salutary reminder of what we all have in waiting f
Like the Preacher in the Ecclesiastes;
We spend our years trying to find some meaning in our lives
It is easy to fall into the bottomless pit
Life is tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing
But before humanity reaches Macbeth’s conclusion,
We must provide with the poetical glory
Musing fortunately as all humanities is anxious
There is a thirsty for poetical wisdom
Which parochial selfish education cannot quench,
There ought to be a list of great poetical works
From east, west, north and south of the world
Globalectically Nursing poetic urge of the earth
With which every piece of humanity should suckle
In wisdom that Books have the power to convey wisdom,
From these poetical sources that humanity learn about love
And loss, about memory and desire,
About loyalty and duty,
About our world and love-bound universe
And about what it means to be a human being