What mechanism drives the human mind,
compelling us to always be unkind?
For even viruses cooperate,
they have no use for concepts such as hate.
Yet we, it seems, are never satisfied
unless we've joined a team or picked a side.
The love of Aphrodite we eschew,
we see the world from Ares' point of view.
Our lives are ruled by one chief stratagem:
to find the things dividing us from them;
though we might claim it's our side that has won,
Mavortian madness brings us all undone.
The gene for stupid rules, it is quite plain;
its tendrils threaded deep throughout our brain.
Will we catch on, ere we drift out of sight?
The simple truth is, no one wins a fight.
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Author Notes
Today's word: Marvortian (adj.) warlike.
The word is derived from Mars, the Roman God of war. In Greek mythology, he is known as Ares. Aphrodite is the Greek goddess of love, who was known as Venus by the Romans.
The human desire for conflict astounds me. We glorify and celebrate humans destroying each other. We make killers our heroes. We view the world as "those who are for me, and those who are against me". We don't seem to be able to comprehend existence without looking at it through such a prism. Every single mythology seems to have warfare between gods and between people as its pivotal theme. It's bizarre. End of rant. Thanks for reading :)
My much-treasured Christmas present for 2017 is a book by Paul Anthony Jones: "The cabinet of linguistic curiosities". Each page contains a descriptive story about some obscure or archaic word. It occurred to me it would be a fun exercise to try and write, each day, a poem featuring the "word of the day" from the book.
Image by dbking (originally posted to Flickr as [1]) [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
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