Not So Sure

Alan Berecka

June 7, 2026

Socrates knew the wise man knew

nothing more than he didn’t know anything.

Dunning and Kruger proved the corollary—

the unwise man thinks he knows everything.

Although none us would like to be taken

for a fool, we all desire certainty.

Even though to be dead sure of anything

is to live a lie. Hubris never ends well

is the moral of our ancient literature,

but it doesn’t stop us from courting

charlatans who sell their shallow plans

seductive as any snake oil. We flock

toward hollow men who claim to know

the answers, to preachers who preach

with certainty about a book which again

and again reminds us we don’t know anything—

not the time of our death, not the number

of hairs on our head, not the scheduling

nor circumstances of the second coming.

Jesus taught his disciples to live in love

demanded that they not judge their fellow man—

and yet listen to sermons these days

selling purity laws as creeds and dogma,

and you’d swear meanness was the key to heaven.

The last time angels appeared to the disciples,

they told them to stop looking to the sky—

Damn good advice if you ask me, for one

realm is impossible enough for us to understand.

Alan Berecka resides with his wife Alice and an ornery rescue dog named Ophelia in Sinton, Texas  He retired in January from being a librarian at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi and is settling into a whole new level of contentment. His poetry has appeared in such places as the American Literary Review, Texas Review, and The San Antonio Express. He has authored three chapbooks, and six full collections, the latest of which is Atlas Sighs from Turning Plow Press, 2024. A Living is not a Life: A Working Title (Black Spruce Press, Brooklyn, 2021) was a finalist in the Hoffer Awards. From 2017 to 2019 he served as the first poet laureate of Corpus Christi.