On the Edge of History

On the Edge of History

A marble finger points to a scatter of stars,
traces a curve in the ash-dust of the agora,
a truth spun on the lip of a wine cup, so simple
it would take two thousand years to verify.
Achilles, forever chasing the tortoise,
never catches the light of a confirming lens.

What is a way of knowing but a great silence?
A wind that scours a name from a stele,
that turns a library to kindling for a conqueror’s fire.
It is the weight of a single, sanctioned book
pressing down on a thousand whispered scrolls,
a cultural erasure, a perfect, calculated crime.

Think of him, the one who knew,
staring at the mute, perfect clockwork of the night.
His proof was a dream his age refused to dream,
a solitude not just of place, but of essence,
a certainty that lived only in the chamber of his own skull.
He died unvindicated, a failed chord in a song
he would never hear finished.

But in that winter of disregard, one must conceive
an invincible summer. Not a denial of the cold,
nor a foe to the real, but a deeper realism—
a sun held within, a private gravity
around which a stubborn hope orbits.
It is the fuel for the long watch,
the warmth for a truth not yet born.

And so the curve of truth, a patient thing,
pushes through the strata of forgotten wars,
the sediment of dogma. It is a river
cutting its own canyon in the dark.
It waits. It haunts. It is Derrida’s ghost,
the specter that troubles the feast of the certain,
whispering what you excluded is returning.

And justice, too, is a haunting.
A delayed resonance. A soundwave
that finally finds its shattering glass.
It is the seed of a story, buried in the ash,
that germinates in an anti-colonial future,
a secret of history now shouted from a rooftop,
righting a balance the ledgers said was closed.

This is not passive. This is not fate.
It is courage, a human agency that chooses
to tend that inner fire, to pick up the scattered pieces of the dream,
to fit the lens to the eye and confirm
the old, magnificent guess.
It is the choice to listen for the ghost,
to decode the whisper in the archive’s rust.

For the dreaming is not metaphor.
It is the ancestral realm, a living reality—
not a memory, but a current.
The old astronomers are dreaming still,
their precise figures humming in the wire,
their faces glimpsed in the constellation of data.
We stand on the edge they carved,
our inner summer their kindling,
and the future is being built from their silence,
a bridge of light thrown across the dark.