If you’ve been around cattle, you already know what comes out the end opposite the nose. You also know that in politics, as in the barnyard, what goes around comes around.
Socrates, democracy’s supreme rabble-rousing patriot, could have escaped his legal predicament simply by leaving Athens.  History says he surrendered because of his sense of obligation to Athens’ judicial system, flawed as it was.  I think he was also so sickened by the decline of Athenian democracy that he couldn’t bare to watch its death from any distance.  For Socrates a cup of Hemlock was certainly sweeter than witnessing the birth of history’s first democratically elected totalitarian government.

     Whither

Our withers weather
the whether or nots
of knots of withering
hails of shot from
distempered hells we’ve
tempered and wrought
from our dithering withers
which darkness would blot–
but cannot.

Gavin W Sisk
Sept. 2012