Alastair Morrison

From History

To learn history and to learn
not to learn from it. Jacques Cartier cruises inland,
takes in cambric, hauls past wet pine barrens
where General Wolfe will be painted.
Aeneas makes his Libyan harbour. Carthage burns.
Or Troy. Accounts vary. Each time though
some assurance is extracted from eternity or
whoever else happens to be around.
The long bones lie in hieroglyphs
promising. This is it. This is something. 

To learn history and to learn
not to learn from it. From,
as though the grammar were itself an engine,
or bone could look at bone and draw conclusions.
As though repetition, where we choose to find it,
told us more than itself. Things are here
and still here, violent, facing away.

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Alastair Morrison is a medical student with a former career as an English professor. He writes about the humanities in healthcare and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pidgeonholes, Canadian Literature, Reservoir Road Literary Review and other places. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, with his spouse and two children.