It's as if it's left to some of us to explain,
to make a few insightful remarks before we go
that will tell of the history of humanity,
a few incapsulating words.
To my ear, it's often Irishmen, poets,
those with the oldest blood type
good for the rest,
a Universal donor, not that it necessarily
does them any good beyond
a natural cold nose.
They have a need for explaining things.
And the lines of those who've come before them,
stick with them,
an example of a sensed observation,
'too long a sacrifice
can make a stone of the heart,'
almost like math.

Their minds work in a certain manner,
leading them to be caught up
in the way events play themselves out.
It was left to John F. Kennedy
to explain what could usefully be said
after the chiefs put him up to The Bay of Pigs,
as if they wanted him left holding the bag,
to play into the wishes of LeMay,
barbecue the entire island.
So he stood at that old lectern
in the State Department
the responsible officer of the government
to explain what he could of the matter
without going into it.
They'd told him it would all go smoothly,
and was it just bad luck?
His arm he put out on the side of the lectern
and looked down as he spoke.

There's explaining to do, truths to be told,
if you're an honest man,
involved with life and other people's wills,
not that you always get the chance.
You'd admit, like he did,
first of all, your own faults in the matter.
But matters are always complex.
They leave the need to explain,
when time allows, somewhere
down the line.  Less your own fault,
the whole picture, when it's seen.

So it is against our will
that we become poets.
We wish things were somehow cleaner
easier to explain, that outcomes sometimes were
vastly different than they turned out to be.
It all works out to bring a understanding
greater of the species.

To the dead we owe that in life
we did not understand them enough,
had an image, were too busy to follow up
not reading them as they lived
like we should have done.
And this too,
it takes some explaining.