Return to Lyric 13

Glosa: Tell the truth, easy, plain and simple.

Glosa: Tell the truth, easy, plain and simple.

Cabeza: 

Tell all the truth but tell it slant 
Success in circuit lies 
Too bright for our infirm delight 
The Truth’s superb surprise 
A lightening to the Children eased 
With explanation kind 
The Truth must dazzle gradually 
Or every man be blind 

                                Emily Dickinson 



What is truth? 
It’s no more than
what’s convenient,
and allows us to cooperate.
What is false? 
It’s really much the same, don’t deny
those who hold their truths 
close to their hearts, 
Tell all the truth but tell it slant 
Success in circuit lies. 

You may procrastinate,
and obfuscate, 
until its too late, 
and use rhetoric
laid on thick, 
to deceive before our eyes,
but it will shine through, 
deception’s web of lies, 
Too bright for our infirm delight 
The Truth’s superb surprise.

You may silence the press,
kill reporters, 
and quell the media, 
as they show us what they ought to;
but we shall tell the truth, easy,
plain and simple, as if to a child, 
and hear a million whispers 
grow into a roar, ‘No More!’ 
A lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind.

So listen to my truths, softly spoken:
to be alive is to feel pain,
to feel another’s is to be human,
to enjoy another’s is sadistic, 
and bystanders who stand by 
even-handed principles are complicit,
as bulldozers clear cemeteries of the dead,
twice dead; out of sight and out of mind,
The Truth must dazzle gradually 
Or every man be blind.

And if you have been, thank you for reading.