Lost Works Poem by David Welch

I was reading Aristotle,
because I am just weird like that,
and as I poured through ancient words
I was presented with the fact
that what I read from classic times
saw far deeper then I can see,
he's twenty-three centuries dead,
and somehow still smarter than me.
But there's no shame in learning from
the writings of a genius mind,
and it's comforting that we still
have this wisdom from bygone times,
but then I stop and remember,
when I have looked at all he wrote,
it's tempting to think we have all,
but the truth of it is, we don't.

We've got maybe a third of it,
and do we even have his best?
The rest of it has disappeared,
it wasn't copied with the rest.
The originals longs rotted,
what we have copies made by monks,
what they had not, or valued low
has now forever been undone.
And though some people do assume
that all the best stuff was retained,
I think of all the books I've read,
from the genius to the inane,
and noticed that great wisdom can
sometimes come from an average read,
that one high point in the banal,
and who knows just where that might lead?
So even if the best remain,
and all the average works were tossed,
it still truly depresses me
when I realize all that we've lost.

Now Aeschylus wrote ninety plays,
and only six of them are left,
Sophocles wrote one hundred twenty,
now to seven can we attest.
And given how much those few plays
have shaped drama down through the age,
can you imagine what we'd have
if all those stories still remained?
In history there was Livy,
who wrote the long story of Rome, ,
in one hundred forty-two books,
today just thirty-five are known.
The Iliad, The Odyssey,
Two great epics we all revere…
that cycle had six more poems,
and not one of them have we here.
Even the Bible refers to
countless books we no longer know,
what would our faiths all look like now
if to those texts we still could go?

The loss of Alexandria,
the burning of Ashburnham House,
the Grand Library of Baghdad
which the Mongolians tore down,
the countless Aztec codices
that the conquistadors all burned...
just thinking of the knowledge lost
sometimes can make my stomach churn.
Even Shakespeare claims a ‘lost play, '
this is not bound to antiquity,
Scott Joplin's opera Guest of Honor
has been swallowed by history.
Even some tales by Hemmingway
disappeared in a lost suitcase,
happens still in our modern age,
a quite avoidable disgrace.
Only God knows just what we've lost,
and isn't keen on sharing it,
what we still have is half the tale,
we've lost so much wisdom and wit.
It can fill a curious mind
with a sense of tired despair,
paper rots and the stone erodes
until it all just goes nowhere…
Perhaps, these days, the bits and bites
will keep all of our knowledge better,
after all, don't the people say
the Internet is forever?

Isn't it?

….on an unrelated note, I'm gonna go post this on every poetry forum I can find…