Reading an old translation of Shakespeare's Othello,
how Iago so easily dooms Othello, I remenber
the bafflement of the translator in the foreword,
who wonders how gullible the supposedly great
war-leader can be, and with the leaders of this
later world being incompetent and monstrous
or merely incompetent and craven cowards, fit
only to stand before a wall waiting for a fusillade
or in the gallows waiting to turn with the wind,
I have no problem to believe that Othello
is a wretched fool led astray and to murder,
a man who orders soldiers to die for a bought
cause, but can't himself be but led to slaughter.
What is hard to believe is that he kills himself
after fair, claimed too pure and innocent to believe,
and so believably real, Desdemona lies dead -
our wretches so very, very rarely do this service
to the planet. The translator, in the midst
of the Cold War, shot himself in a toilet - so
we choose ourselves the stages for our exit,
if our leaders don't choose it for us with bombs,
missiles and starvation, letting plagues run rampant
because they believe in gods and not science,
because they want to go to Mars and leave
the Earth as dead as that desolate star.
06.04.2025
Poem Poems Poetry Verse
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