Historically Speaking

Stephen Dunn

It was a year of pirates in speedboats,

anonymous bullies spreading privacies

on the Internet, and the worst of them

doing worse than that and wishing to be known

for what they'd done, their perfidy

an advertisement for a cause.

Thus it was a bad year for historians,

whose stories couldn't be correct

for longer than a few days. More than ever

the imperfections of memory

would combine with the slipperiness

of documentation to produce versions

only people who need not be persuaded

could agree with.

It was a war

where the enemy sometimes was wearing

the same clothes as its opponent,

and both sides believed their cause

was righteous, and years from now the victors,

if we were unlucky, would tell it as it wasn't,

unless we were the victors, and our historians

would tell it from so many angles

that both was and wasn't

would read like a symphony of discordancies,

an honoring of so many counterpoints

that I, for one, might find a place to rest uneasy,

historically speaking, among all the bloodshed,

the horror, which would stop for a while and continue.