It is a simple thing
to say 'I am a man.'
It is something else to prove it.

Many great men have already asked
of themselves,
'what is a man?'
Some lesser men
have also
questioned their worth.

And where are the answers,
where is the glorious, redeeming light,
come to wash our sins of existence away
and purge humanity from the soil of being?
The dirt of living from fingernail to stained lip,
for hand and mouth to feed
confessions pushed down behind filthy tongues
as if our mouths could ever sputter forth
words of redemption
from turgid little minds.

And yet, there have been great men born,
whose souls have touched our land,
and embedded their mark, their unique insignia
onto the rich mosaic of mother earth.


We have breathed awe in their presence,
stole inspiration from their achievements
and envisioned impossibilities
because of what has come to past.


We have stitched the memory of their figure
into our tapestry of historic power,
emboldened years with timestamps
of progression and prestige.


We wore emblems bore out of their fabric
to show the world how advanced we were,
and adopted ideologies without
understanding their execution.


We stole their words from record and page
and engraved them onto monuments,
gravestones, t-shirts, tattoos
and wore them as our own.


We carried their cross for many stations
beyond their death, and suffered
heavy loads, looking to make
martyrs out of ourselves.


We found martyrs and gave them throne
before death robbed us of victory
and congratulated ourselves
in cheating mortality.


We built palaces and libraries of learning
to house man's philosophies,
cataloguing gilded manifestos
across dusty shelves.


We tied down our brothers and carved spears
to slice their skin, so that with spilt blood
mutual consent could be reached
through the agony of disagreement.


We marched into town lands and cities
crying our slogans with armbands
emblazoned with emblems
signifying our beliefs.


We scrawled rudimentary images of mankind's
first sights onto the inside of caves,
not thinking of the discovery
of future generations.


We explored space for deeper meaning
than earth offered, and found
an ever-expanding blankness
at the end of a telescope.


And history affords us the benefits of other people's learning,
so many walls broken through,
so many walls crumbling from the weight
of intellectual investigation.
We took shit and made it shine,
took diatribe and transcribed it into gospel,
turned deaf ears onto the word of God
and we lost our way,
our God-forsaken way.


So many energies spent
of external examination of the world,
new species, new planets,
new stars to light our path;
and we subscribe to the daily whoroscopes
unquestioning,
unflinching in the rollout
of our lives.

So, what is a man?
What is a great man?
And where is God?
Claiming that God has died,
God has abandoned us,
mankind was His joke, His entertainment
and now He has grown bored of us,
and bored He should.
The dying doesn't interest us,
we give up on the dying
and let them have their last words,
last breaths, last meals,
final wishes;
what does it mean to us, who have a future,
whose life is secured?
And God looks down at that security
and waits for your time
to come.
He waits at your bedside
in sickness and health
and tends your brow,
your troubled, beaten brow.

Look at your tattoos, your emblems, your epitaphs,
your armbands, your palaces, your libraries,
your spaceships, your spears, your bloodshed,
your brothers, your slogans, your cities,
your manifestoes, your philosophies, your tapestries,
your martyrs, your monuments, your t-shirts
and consider this:

Death comes quickly,
and like a fire that swallows its neighbourhood,
there is no time to gather our possessions.

A great man has no need for possessions.
He can stand by himself,
secure in the knowledge that
his tree bore fruit,
and his fellow man ate of that fruit
and for a small moment,
they tasted salvation.

Want to comment on this Poetry? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Poetry and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...