The Winning Poems

CIVILISATION AS WE KNOW IT
Sydney Giffard

Are you sitting comfortably,
and have you all brought your sexuality
with you? Then we can begin.
There were civilisations in Egypt
and China, and in Central America,
or among the Beaker B people
come to that. But it was Greece
and Rome, and above all their writers,
with the prophets of course,
and later the influence of Christianity,
who or which brought us what we know
as our cultural heritage.
The Norsemen added touches
chiefly relevant to the Royal Navy,
and Peter the Great.
You do not have to choose
between Moses and Homer,
or Ovid and Saint Paul.
We have them all to tell us
what Robespierre and Thomas Aquinas
also believed: that the human race
may or may not be perfectible,
but can come to know its place,
which is where Freud and Darwin
appear, in that order, with Einstein
and Isaac Newton (or Walton,
as he was sometimes called).

Image (photograph)
We can learn it all from these videos,
for we are the privileged age,
the Great Eclectics,
encyclopedists with added birth control
and an unprecedented variety
of terminatory procedures.
Industriously, we make love,
which is why you are here today,
and you know so much about it
that I have nothing more to say.
There are pick-me-ups and put-me-downs
in the packs of capsules behind you , by the way.
Copyright of this poem remains with the author.
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