Thinking: A Poem

By Don Kilmer | Published June 5, 2020 9:30 PM PT

What makes us think we’re human?
To what should we aspire?
Are we merely just the sum of
Appetite, desire? 

How should we discover, 
What happiness to pursue?
What baubles? What pleasures? 
Do we think that we are due? 

In striving to achieve, 
A golden mean of well-being, 
Can we rely on mere emotion?
Or should we start with thinking? 

And maybe in the thinking, 
We’ll run across the thought,
We should always stand ready,
To judge what we have wrought. 

Before we can control 
The anarchy we see, 
Mustn't we acknowledge,
That reason is the key?

Search for wisdom, search for truth, 
Strive to learn wrong from right. 
Truth begins within the eyes, 
Wisdom demands insight. 

To think and search and value, 
These are human traits. 
If we abandon these, 
We’ll have less-than-human fates. 

Don Kilmer is an editor of Talking and a Second Amendment litigator living in Idaho. See Don’s previous Talking essays (an RSS feed is here and a JSON feed is here).