The Incarcerated Word

What was created to expose
is now a fortress just to hide

A bastion of higher learning
within a haven safe for lies

Where discourse once was treasured
the ivy droops and sighs

With comfort their true measure,
the dilettantes still cry

Plato is disgusted,
John Locke is more than riled

As a millennia of learning
is mocked in false denial

Students weak and wounded
from those lessons never learned

Their tomorrow’s but a doomsday
their futures sure to burn

Those words were there to save them
both the hated and revered

All truth in dialectics
—now abandoned by their fear

(Villanova Pennsylvania: March, 2016)