A Million Lies

Even though it was, I think, only yesterday that something provided the vague prompt that there might be a poem there, I can't remember what it was.

Not to worry. I've been more or less in a state of thinking I'd not write another poem for most of the time I've been writing them so I thought I'd try. It can easily be removed from here if, after its subsequent review, it is found not good enough. But I'm glad enough to have it for now.

It's about Marco Polo, the reports he took back to Venice from his trip into the East. For the most part, I believe him but I wouldn't blame those who didn't at the time because, if I'd been there then, I'd have suspected him of being a purveyor of fake news and, like it says, science fiction with which to astound the gullible masses. 

Maybe I'll get his book, read it and write a better poem later but there is this for now. I'm not unhappy with it. We will find out after a couple of weeks if it still looks okay but this having once been established as a website to 'promote' my poems, it's long overdue that it featured such a thing.

  
A Million Lies

He had been there and back, he said, 

Seen unicorns and behaviour
Beyond their quaint imagining.
Some bought it all and bought the book
While others would have none of it
And went back to their boring work
Or stared into the drab canal.
And even those carving the stone
On the ornate basilica,
Who had little faith in dragons
Or that it could be turtles
All the way down weren’t as tempted
As they might have been.

He might not have been anywhere,
No further than, say, Antioch,
Made most of the rest of it up
And then pretended to come back
With his crazy science fiction
To make such a name for himself.
He got that far, at least.