-- What We Know and Never Know --
John Herlihy
He knew there were some things he would never know;
There were so many things that he would come to know.
He thought he knew things that others didn’t know;
Others knew a multitude of things he would never know.
Much of what others knew he no longer needed to know;
Already, he knew how much he didn’t really know.
Above all, he knew how much he really needed to know;
He knew knowledge to be useless if not acted upon.
Knowledge, on its own, is but a stale bread image of itself;
Knowledge lived and internalized, now there is wisdom’s wealth.
Wisdom teaches us to question the truth of all knowledge;
If we don’t know, we need to ask, to seek the truth of things.
Knowledge speaks from the mind, wisdom from the soul;
Knowledge breaks down into facts, wisdom unites in truth.
Our friend, knowledge, is proud of all that it knows;
Our brother, wisdom, humbled by all that it never knows.
When he died, people never knew of him when he was alive;
Through his poetry, they came to know of him thru his poems.
Years, alas centuries later, others learned the wisdom he knew;
By then, of course, he was long since gone. . . and never knew.
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(c) John Herlihy 13 August 2020