They told me history repeats itself.
I heard it from my father and in class.
I found the phrase in books upon a shelf,
with liberty to browse. It came to pass
I got it, reading fiction, history:
the cruelties Dickens caught, Voltaire and Swift.
I noticed awful similarity
in Austen’s arguments and Orwell’s drift.

But repetition now accelerates –
the cycle shrinks as pixels blink and spread.
The body politic degenerates
at speed – depravity is never dead.
And virus surges yet, that wasn’t solved.
It’s bleak to see the way our kind’s evolved.