Epitaph for a Lost Civilisation

by Paul Martin Freeman (December 2025)

—
—

Mine honour is my life; both grow in one:
Take honour from me, and my life is done.
—Richard II, Act I, Scene 1, 188-9

–

for Professor Joseph S. Salemi
–
O what is left, our armies lying defeated,
Surveying now the ruins of our world,
When not from foe, but honour we retreated,
Our past disgraced and flag of shame unfurled.
=
That thing that long ago our forebears gave us;
That quality transcending time and space,
We just forgot, and nothing now can save us
As all that happens next we must embrace.
=
We tolerated the intolerant,
Inviting him and millions of his kind:
As masters once on every continent,
A debt we felt to huddled humankind.
=
We flaunted wealth and partied to excess;
We loved our world of things that ever changed;
With such as these our measure of success,
From roots and all we were became estranged.
=
We drifted in a sea of vacancy;
Believed the things we wanted to believe;
Assumed that only we had agency:
A people lost and prone to self-deceive.
=
We didn’t speak out when we needed to;
Ignored our fears or hoped they’d go away:
A heedlessness which then proceeded to
Become another debt we’d have to pay.
=
We blurred the line dividing foes from friends
And treated all alike as though the same;
Forgetting where appeasement always ends,
We failed our friends to our eternal shame.
=
We closed our ears to all the raging hate;
Abased ourselves before a barbarous foe;
Abandoning what made our nation great,
Invited on ourselves a world of woe.
=
But worst we made our menfolk timid women
And taught them it was wrong to stand and fight;
Made virile masculinity forbidden
And bloodless creatures words would put to flight.
=
And thus we threw away nobility:
That regal standard raised to guide our lives;
That uncorrupted godlike quality
That makes us fight for good and shield our wives.
=
A race of craven cowards our kind became
That rather offered up its girls than fight:
Upon ourselves heaped more eternal shame,
Unworthy anymore of freedom’s light.
=
And so the outlook now is grim and stark––
How bright by contrast yesterday appears!
A dhimmi future: dismal, dim and dark,
Enough to justify our bleakest fears.
=
If only we had fought our battles harder,
And disciplined ourselves in self-belief,
Our world might not have ended in disaster,
But rather we’d be sighing with relief.
–

Table of Contents