Giovanni Malito
Nostradamus
You saw the future
in its pre-embryonic state
but your contemporaries
shrugged, saying
it was something you ate
or that it was the opium
you had stuffed into your pipe.
And your beard grew
longer and whiter
for you saw and you knew
the horrors to come.
They were something
you could not withstand
as the agony stabbed at your eyes
with the arrowhead visions
that came from the inside:
dying children shrieking
before strange metallic war machines
and all-consurning fires.
These are what filled your bowl
of clear water
and you were mesmerised.
Like but unlike Narcissus
you could not turn away
so you wept often
into that bottomless bowl.
Your contemporaries could not
empathise and they blamed you,
only you and what you served,
when your nearer prophecies came true.
And so, Nostradamus
you changed your tune
and you sang your premature dirges
in shrouded quatrains
that only some would decipher
but none would ever appreciate.
Somehow I find it hard now
to believe you are comforted
by the exonerating knowledge
that you have been proven right,
very often right and too often
with such crippling accuracy.
in its pre-embryonic state
but your contemporaries
shrugged, saying
it was something you ate
or that it was the opium
you had stuffed into your pipe.
And your beard grew
longer and whiter
for you saw and you knew
the horrors to come.
They were something
you could not withstand
as the agony stabbed at your eyes
with the arrowhead visions
that came from the inside:
dying children shrieking
before strange metallic war machines
and all-consurning fires.
These are what filled your bowl
of clear water
and you were mesmerised.
Like but unlike Narcissus
you could not turn away
so you wept often
into that bottomless bowl.
Your contemporaries could not
empathise and they blamed you,
only you and what you served,
when your nearer prophecies came true.
And so, Nostradamus
you changed your tune
and you sang your premature dirges
in shrouded quatrains
that only some would decipher
but none would ever appreciate.
Somehow I find it hard now
to believe you are comforted
by the exonerating knowledge
that you have been proven right,
very often right and too often
with such crippling accuracy.
Page(s) 40-41
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