An ‘ 2 Plato
by Brian Wheeler

O Plato, I know you intended well, to find the “good”
in your didactic ideals, in your absolute forms, your
formless content. But if you only knew that
you could have known through intuition, you could have
been through intuition. Oh my…. How nice that would be,
if you walked this path. For maybe there would be more
peace today, instead of crazed leaders proclaiming that their
way is THEE way… they are RIGHT, and GOOD…
And those who see it different are WRONG and EVIL, and must be
bombed…both intellectually and physically… they must experience
the crusade of democracy. Those poor innocent people who were
burned for their own good. Both past and present. These poor people.
If you only knew Plato, where your thoughts have led… would
you still stand by them? Or would you look for another way…
of knowing, of being?

O Plato, I see the wisdom in your voice. For it has created many
wonderful things, many powerful technologies and forms
of communication, and your Idealism has saved lives… we have
grown so strong from it. Yet it has made us so weak. Your words
are too powerful, too concentrated. They have poisoned the air we
breathe, the water we drink, the bodies we inhabit, the food we eat,
the nature we “control.” Your words have simultaneously enlightened
us and poisoned us. Where is the balance? Maybe this is the balance.
But Plato your words seem too sharp, and need to be diluted down,
put into perspective. Too many people have been burned for their own
good. We’ve created too many problems… mostly unrealized though.
Your words I love, for w/o them I wouldn’t have this computer to write,
yet, I wish you met a Taoist or a Buddha, or… I wish I didn’t have
this computer, or didn’t know what typing was, if it meant that harmony
could be restored… or never broken in the first place. Maybe so many
would still be alive, or lived longer or more peacefully. Or maybe not.

O Plato your words are useful, but they are not the way. They are merely
a singular path, and life is not singular. How nice it would be if Einstein
could have shown you a different way. If only you could have heard
his words, his harmonious chatter of relativity, “The intuitive mind is
a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created
a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Brian Wheeler is a student at Fairhaven. He says this poem was written for JT Stewart’s Shapes of Poetry course as Apostrophe.