Hail the Homosapien !

(Partly adapted from a poem in the ‘Monthly Review’)

They say he cannot be changed….
Man will always be a man,
A bundle of envy and greed,
A hedonistic creature,
A change in form,
But in essence an animal,
And sometimes worse so…..
So there is no question of ‘Human progress’,
That's what they say….

8000 years ago,
On the banks of the Rhine,
In the foothills of the Alps,
And in the Black forests of Germania,
He was into Incest,
And into Cannibalism….

Now, in those same places,
He talks about ‘Table manners’,
And about ‘Animal Rights’…
If this is not ‘Human progress’,
Then what is?

He may be a newly evolved species,
Just about 60,000 years old,
Subsisting on a thin crust of silica,
On a small planet,
Revolving around a second grade star,
In the suburbs of the galaxy…..

But he can know the past from the stones,
Can transform the present by his labour,
And can work towards a glorious future ,
By his conscious and collective action….

Man is innately noble,
Is infinitely perfectible….
And is capable of scaling,
Ever new heights of Reason and Science….

Hail the homosapien !