A Fly On the Wall

It seems I may not need to be A fly upon the wall, For so many folks are ready to Reveal their all in all. Innumerable tell all books And gossip magazines Are ready to print the stuff that once Was kept behind the scenes. You can go on line and whisper All the secrets that you know, Or show your private moments On TV reality show. For a trifle of notoriety, There is nothing they won’t say. If you want to peek in other’s lives It’s not too hard to do today. When I was young, the party line, Was the local gossip’s toy. If you mentioned something secret, It would fill her heart with joy. It would come back to you the next day And would have been enlarged a bit. Your sad secret is much juicier When someone else is telling it. I would like to have been listening To The Sermon on the Mount, To be sure that Matthew had it right In his remarkable account. Or to have heard with my own ears Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. That’s something that an humble fly Could not appreciate, I guess. I am glad some human stood there Who could write it down for me. We have the written word to thank For preserving history.