It is said that great minds converge upon the same thought,
as though wisdom were a river whose course is inevitable.
And yet, the lesser minds—the stewards of daily ruin—
deviate, bending the current toward their own ends,
guided not by foresight but by the weight of their hunger,
the clink of coins, the geometry of immediate gain.
Their words sing of preservation, yet their hands are erasers,
rubbing out the ink of ancient contracts between man and earth.
A wise soul, long vanished into the anonymity of dust,
once intoned:
“A thousand years a city, and a thousand years a forest.”
But words, though immortal in script, are fragile in practice.
The trees were taken—first as kindling, then as scaffold,
then as the raw material of kingdoms that mistook permanence for possession.
They fell, one by one, to the axes and the laws of necessity,
until necessity itself turned to folly.
And when the rains came—fierce and unimpeded—
there was nothing left to hold back the flood.
The mountains, bereft of their green sentinels,
crumbled into sand, into dust, into the empty measure of time.
A thousand years passed.
No roots coiled around forgotten citadels,
no weeds whispered through the cracks of lost avenues.
Instead, smoke and dust wove a new history—
one of obscured horizons and unrelenting heat,
of streets where the wind carried not the scent of pine
but the acrid breath of engines.
Perhaps, if the words were spoken again,
their truth would be sharpened by irony:
“A thousand years a city, and a thousand years a wasteland.”
Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges co-created with ChatGPT