"The Man Who Saved History"

What can I say about my first poem?

It started out as a song lyric crafted after Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald". Never having written anything but parodies of songs already written, I went to his lyrics to see how to structure an epic song.

I took this and another "pre-song" to an open mic at The Prism Coffeehouse in Charlottesville, Virginia where Aer Stevens was the M.C. He had the supreme audacity to call me a "poet"--the last thing I ever wanted to be.

After the reading he suggested that "The Man Who Saved History" was more like a poem than a song.

Based on the life of Caius Marius in Plutarch's Lives, I wrote it mostly because I saw the glaring modern-day similarities between the Germans and the Italians. And because of the shocking scene of German women slashing their defeated men--husbands, brothers, fathers, and sons--to death as they left the battlefield in ignominy.

All would have been different for us today if these hyper-martial Teutons had won. We owe history as we know it to Caius Marius.