Enlightenment 

“It’s all empty, empty,” 
he said to himself.
“The sex and drugs. The violence, especially.”
So he went down into the world to exercise his virtue,

thinking maybe that would help.
He taught a little kid to build a kite.
He found a cure, 
and then he found a cure 

for his cure.
He gave a woman at the mercy of the weather 
his umbrella, even though 
icy rain fell and he had pneumonia.
He settled a revolution in Spain.

Nothing worked.
The world happens, the world changes,
the world, it is written here, 
in the next line,
is only its own membrane—

and, oh yes, your compassionate nature,
your compassion for our kind.
Credit

Copyright © 2018 by Vijay Seshadri. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 1, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“I wrote ‘Enlightment’ because I was thinking about the state of the world, which people do these days more than they used to, I suspect. I can’t say, of course, that the poem adds anything to our understanding. It was the feeling of the thinking that I wanted.”
—Vijay Seshadri