My new poem: ‘Am I even affected by this?’

Am I even affected by this?

A castle burns on a hill:
people and animals flee,
a sense of community is lost,
treasures are grabbed or forgotten.

There is a time of confusion:
easy pickings for roaming predators,
the end of a dynasty,
the end of so many stories.

With or without dragons, trolls, mages,
princesses, monks, lost prodigal sons
or armies of mercenaries transported by magic
from other realms,
this scene is played out
in so many ways: in old chronicles and newer content
for programs in the Television and Internet Age
…and in fantasy novels.

Am I even affected by this?

On page 57:  yes;
on page 163:  no;
on page 292:  possibly;
Final page:  yes.
Definitely:  Yes.

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Note on the poem: several weeks ago I’d written about half of it and sketched out the main ideas, relating to both a classic kind of scene in fantasy fiction and my own questioning of reading habits, the nature of an individuals reading experience and how much or how little impact a scene can have ‘outside the book’, then tried to combine those two issues and play them against each other.