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.