we cannot seem to learn from history

 history should slap us awake

we cannot seem to learn from history:

we tired of losing in Vietnam,

so we left,

pretending to ourselves that our South Vietnamese allies

would continue to resist their determined brothers,

to resist the North Vietnamese definition of their nationalism,

their definition of the heart of their culture,

now Afghanistan throws off the contagion of American ways,

and reverts to an older version of the “right” culture,

the women, half of its people,

who we encouraged to dream of an open future

are left with a world of nightmare instead,

the translators, the drivers, 

the friends we cultivated,

are in trouble, 

a trouble we could have foreseen and prepared for,

but we conveniently forgot the history we should know well,

I despair at how so many in our country

cannot even recognize correctly what happened in the last election,

cannot recognize why great fires and floods are overwhelming us,

I have long wondered at Rome and how it collapsed,

when it could have reinvigorated and done better, at least for awhile,

I despair that the United States 

blindly repeats the worst mistakes in history.

by Henry H. Walker

August 13, ‘21