Don’t Expect Wisdom from Growth

Your foolishness never gets any better.
It really doesn’t. The planet may grow up.
Individual people won’t. Knowledge grows

Like rust on a fence, like moss on a tombstone.
It eats in to what supports it. It becomes
A beauty of its own, sustained by decay

Of hard matters into something rich and strange,
Something new and, in some ways, something better,
A ruin, an illustration, a warning.