Learning History
Music plays in your head, vaguely Persian,
the middle eastern rhythms remind you of incense
of dark cafes and swaying hips, strange wine
and old movies,
All locales you have never seen in real life,
creations of the books and movies that flicker through your life,
somehow more real than history, more real than facts,
fixed in your heart
instead of your mind,
A stronger place. A place full of beauty that likely never existed,
but should.
About this poem
My sense of history and culture was formed as much by novels as textbooks. Likely that is less accurate, but far more romantic, than reality.
I can live with that.
Tom
