#dogmatism
Suppose that truth were a woman
what then?
Would not the old philosophers
blush in their graves,
those solemn architects of certainty,
who came with iron theses
and granite conclusions
as though desire were conquered
by hammer and decree?
They approached her heavily
with the terrible seriousness of men
who mistake weight for wisdom.
Their arguments marched like soldiers,
their systems rose like fortresses,
and truth in unfettered fields
if she were indeed a woman
only smiled behind her veil
and slipped away
into shadow.
For who wins a woman
with clumsy importunity?
Who captures her
with syllogisms
stacked like stone?
Never once did she yield herself
to those dogmatic lovers
who believed possession
was the same as understanding.
And now their doctrines stand
like abandoned statues
in a ruined square
faces stern,
eyes hollowed by centuries of doubt.
Some say they have fallen.
Others say they gasp still,
propped against the walls of time,
their marble lungs filling slow,
with the dust of forgotten certainty.
Perhaps those mighty systems
those cathedrals of wisdom and thought
with their pillars of reason
and domes of eternal claim
If were raised upon humbler soil,
an ancient superstition
that the soul sits somewhere
behind the syllables of language,
buried in
a trick of grammar
that taught us to believe in the tyrant “I,”
or the audacious swelling
of our private experiences
into universal law of self
small human facts,
all too human,
dressed in the robes of infinity
without question.
Still, we must not despise them.
For dogmatism, too,
had its grandeur.
Like astrology
charting imaginary heavens,
it demanded gold, patience, devotion
the long labour of minds
hungry for the absolute.
From such dreams
rose pyramids of our thought,
vast architectures of every belief
stretching from Asia to Egypt,
where the spirit carved eternity
into heavy stone.
It seems that all great things
must first wander the earth
as monstrous caricatures
vast exaggerations
of a truth not yet born.
So perhaps dogmatic philosophy
was only that
a colossal mask,
a rehearsal of certainty,
a thunderous promise
of the unknown
waiting centuries
for gentler hands
to approach the woman called truth
not with chains of logic
but with curiosity,
with patience,
with the quiet courage
to let her remain
unpossessed,
until wisdom and knowledge
meet their own reflection in our final knowing.
Mar 8
Mar 8, 2026 at 10:51 AM UTC
Wear your beliefs
Like a half-cross set irrevocably
On the tip of your tongue
Thirty silvers in sum
You hold doctrine
Like a sinner postcoital
Of an ecstasy
Wane and fleeting
May 6, 2015
May 6, 2015 at 1:56 AM UTC