The Secret History of Two Ingenious Knights

The revelations were scattered in banker’s boxes

piled on a stage, everything haphazard,

the piles and papers, keepsakes, news clips,

but sorted out, they gradually opened my eyes.

 

Though I was just a worker, tidying up,

I could see and I could read, and I knew

something astonishing, fitfully, was taking shape—

centuries of history coming together, a first.

 

It regarded the big boss, the man of the hour,

the don of the day, the lord of the Gulf of America.

Curiously, his pedigree of semi-royals went back

to the most famous one, the stupendous Don Quixote.

 

So the knight-errant of La Mancha had distantly sired

the errant one who championed, You’re fired!

 

They were alike as a picture to its negative,

the light gone dark a matter of chemistry,

the reversal in descent fixing them apart.

Yet both were mad and felt they deserved more praise.

 

Quixote was by the book, righting wrongs

and conveying the honor to Dulcinea, lady of his heart,

as chivalry demanded, though she was made up.

Enchanted, he thought he saw the lady once.

 

Not so the other don. His behavior

was mostly off the books. On the fairway,

the score prefigured, he breezed past the traps,

admiring his one love glimmering in the pools.

 

But his chimera apparently drove him to pot,

continuously whispering, I love you; I love you not.

 

This was more chaos than Quixote suffered

as he stayed true to his delusions.

The latter knight had a hole to fill,

reaching, grabbing, dumping everything down.

 

There were methods to their madness, a genius in both.

As part of the mix, the latter remade his mount

from the foremost nag to a fancy cart, of course,

its canopy purple, a head-turning stroke.

 

It used to be red and blue. But now a mashup

of these conjured the new tone imperial,

with tassels like snow-white ermine below.

Clearly, the guy had an empire state of mind.

 

Like a global graffitist, he made a splash

tagging what he coveted with a purple slash.

 

Then there was loyal Sancho Panza,

a seemingly simple squire who came with a donkey,

a treasured beast that was stolen once. Still,

the squire found ways to serve himself.

 

Quixote promised him an island, all his own,

which the knight would assuredly win in time.

It never panned out as Sancho thought

though he kept on clinging to the dream.

 

Let it go was his advice, finally,

couched in a proverb for all future panzas

like those filling the clubhouse of the latter don.

The secret history got the message across:

 

If something’s not right and you take a pass,

you don’t gain an island, you lose your ass.

 

Copyright © 2025 by Sam S. Dodd