Who knows

[Kynaston Levitt]

Who knows

From the earth we came.
Into the earth we go.
Neither Plato nor Socrates
knew more about it than we know.

Nor the quaint aboriginal elder,
the Sentinelese with his bow,
nor the PhD from Boston,
the book writing Igbo,
the bullfighting Catalan
who wears it on his shoulder
as the bullring’s air grows colder

know.

Despite the fact I really hate these types of poems that rhyme some cliché bit of old "wisdom" in a poetic-sounding and patronizing tone, surely the very premise of this poem isn't as definitively, or matter-of-factly, true as it suggests. It's attempting to philosophize with me without doing any philosophy. There is no epistemology, here, or it's relationship to the philosophy of belief. It's essentially an opinion piece posing as a declarative statement posing as a poem. But, if that was what you were going for, you nailed it.