A World Without Mirrors

To the contributors to our blog, with love and appreciation.

Suppose one day,
Zeus decided to free Narcissus
from vain obsession with his own beauty
and thereby removed all the mirrors from the world.
What would become of us?

A big silent black hole!
The first thing to go
Is the songs of birds
On and on they chirp,
On and on they sing,
Unreceived, unheard: vain sounds.
Then we will realize,
We have lost our sense of hearing.

A dark black hole!
The second thing to go
Is the beauty of trees and plants
On and on they grow,
On and on they bloom,
Unnoticed, unseen: vain visibility.
Then we will realize,
We have lost our sense of vision.

An indifferent black hole!
The last thing to go
Is the meaning of human existence
On and on they create,
On and on they build,
Unappreciated, unacknowledged: vain creativity
Then we will have lost our inner mirrors
We have gone past our last realization.
We have become indifferent.

In a world without mirrors
We would be absorbed into nothingness
But we would no longer care
Because we no longer mattered.

In a world without mirrors
Matters become non-matters.
Surely, a sign of the end of the world.

Tam Dinh
29.09.2007