Thursday, June 20, 2019

KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE

Experience tends
to accumulate gradually—
its little green spears take
their time broadening

into fat wise leaves,
which then rain down
flowers for months thereafter,
with the indiscriminate grace

of a grand old catalpa
tree, anointing as it shelters
everything underneath.

But knowledge is a
much more brutal force—

no cart, all horse; it charges
only forward, carrying nothing
but its own momentum, fast
and hot as lightning

and just as precise—often
pointlessly so: 

only one thing—if it lives
to appreciate it—
is left any different after
it dissipates.