XVII. The Cassandra Archetype

Madness.
We couldn’t see
delusion was vision.
Ahead of your time, Futurist.
Mentor.

Photo By Evelyn De MorganFlickr and [1], Public Domain, Link

A cinquain is a short, unrhymed five-line poem. The word comes from the French and Latin root for “five”. There are two main styles: the traditional American syllable-based form and a simpler word-count style often used in schools.

The idea for this poem came this morning from remembering a man who used to mentor me at work. He would always signal warnings on projects and would often stop them dead in their tracks until answers were provided. We cast him off as a “problem” (mad), and the company let him go, but in hindsight he truly was ahead of his time, as we’re asked to do the same thing today and face many of the same issues.

From Wikipedia: “The term originates in Greek mythologyCassandra was a daughter of Priam, the King of Troy. Struck by her beauty, Apollo provided her with the gift of prophecy, on the condition that she agree to accept his romantic advances (or without prior agreement from Cassandra, depending on the source), but when she refused Apollo’s romantic advances, he placed a curse on her, ensuring that nobody would believe her warnings. Cassandra was left with the knowledge of future events but could neither alter these events nor convince others of the validity of her predictions.” Horrific.

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