Relationships
The Uneasy Marriage of Beauty and Truth
A poem-fable with offspring
Posted July 18, 2014
Beauty and truth locked eyes on a beach
on one gorgeous, sunsetted evening.
And by the next morn, after loving all night
they had already started conceiving.
“Our child will dazzle like the evening we met,”
said beauty, maternally glowing.
“In love with all nature,” said truth with a nod,
“like that beach where our love began growing.”
“What’s real,” nodded beauty, “and I hope it’s all sweet,
as the light and the joy that surrounds us.”
“Sweet or not” cautioned truth, “in pursuit of what’s real,
holding out for what’s sweet just confounds us.”
“I’m sweet” beauty glared, “you’re just getting ‘round now
to calling my sweetness irrelevant?
“Some truths are grotesque,” stammered truth to his love.
Thus into the room walked their elephant.
“There’s beauty in me, and life’s safer by far”
said truth, “when we face all reality.”
“There’s truth in me too” beauty said to here dear,
“And I doubt that what’s true is brutality.”
“How then to explain the ration of pain
we might find when we’re not walking beaches?
I think you’ll concede that there’s vice and there’s greed
And life isn’t just ice cream and peaches.”
“That’s only because, beasts like you bear your claws
giving voice to your fears and anxieties.
If we all only knew that what’s always most true
Is that love is the highest of pieties.”
And to the young couple in love but at odds
United, but each other’s thorn
In nine months and a day, philosophers say
Brave Irony, their child was born.