We Are All Prophets

We Are All Prophets
© Surazeus
2018 03 03

Now that we have transcended struggle for life
we are all prophets of our own religions,
so I am prophet only for myself
and every soul in America now
is the prophet only for their own truth
that we express in the poems of our hearts.

For hundreds of years on our spinning world
most people struggled to survive each day,
plowing the dirt and planting seeds of crops,
manufacturing things in factories,
or forming armies to fight wars for land,
in short brutal lives of desperate desire.

Now that machines produce our plants and cars
everyone now lives like medieval kings
instead of peasants in cramped huts of wood,
dwelling in large clean homes with water pipes
and electric wires to power everything
like air conditioners, refrigerators,
heaters, lights, televisions, and computers,
while we drive cars instead of riding horses
to travel faster to far distant lands.

Back in those days, two hundred years ago,
few geniuses could write great poetry,
traveling across the land in wood wagons
while composing wild-eyed romantic poems
alone in mountain vales where wind blows wild
or striding on sea shores where deep waves roar.

Wordsworth strode around the lakes of Cumbria,
Coleridge dreamed visions in the Quantock Hills,
Keats brooded under plum trees in Hampstead,
Byron journeyed rugged Iberian shores,
Shelley sailed the wind-swept Tyrrhenian Sea,
Emerson sang spells on Florida dunes,
and Whitman loitered in Manhattan streets.

Now millions of poets around the world
follow those wizards on the quest for truth,
traveling through the wilderness of the world
while writing poems on the sand and the sky,
then post verses expressing their deep thoughts
on social media sites for all to read.

We are all now free artists of ourselves,
designing the mask of the self we wear
by reciting, chanting, or singing poems
that capture in geometry of words
the flashing visions that swirl in our minds.

We are all prophets of one world religion,
composing scriptures for our private selves
that chronicle the journeys of our minds
on our lonely quests for meaning of life
that we invent, inspired by joy for truth,
before we dissolve to dust in the wind.