A tanka written by Lee Sonogan

Here we come to a semantic difficulty. Other peoples who were of considerable civilization had been referred to as barbarians for more than a thousand years. Others had been called by the names of the wolves. When the wolves themselves came, there was no other name to give them. The Goths, who were kingdom-founding Christians, had been called barbarians. The Gauls of ancient lineage had been so called, and the talented Vandals. – R.A. Lafferty, The Fall Of Rome
Deem 800 years down the drain,
Interloper clout rapport,
Repeat stencil shit stain,
Plowshare fortunes of world war,
Ancient chronicle inane.
History is how we have learnt to think about ourselves. It’s not as though the Greeks and Romans are static entities out there to be discovered and translated. We make them speak, we talk to them, and they inform what we say. – Mary Beard
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