These are the times – a meditation on truth
` Beauty is truth, truth beauty,- that is is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.`
John Keats (1820) from Ode on a Grecian Urn
Truth is unblemished and clean,
like a snowdrop piercing the hard earth,
or a slender branch or leaf,
or a curlew`s call across the dark moor.
Truth arrests rottenness.
announcing what is green and good.
Freshly, – the air tingles with its purity,
The spores of malice are cleansed,
False words reveal their tarnished emptiness,
The disfigured faces of ignorance crumple in shame.
Truth comes in moments of quiet reflection,
bringing shafts of light to our burdened minds,
Truth can bring peace after heavy hurt and harm has drained the spirit.
And somewhere in the midst of grief it shines and sparkles
with a deeper knowing
But these are the times – the times we yearn for,
when its boldness might blast a carapace of lies,
shake the servile crowd,
scour the hollow rhetoric
and justly and mercifully and humbly,
re – assemble what is beautiful and true:
the ravaged pieces of decency and compassion to a fragmented world.
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