Bang!
First a tiny spark
Then a supernova blast
A medium-sized star is born
Then a burning world.
Defying all entropic odds
Pieces of matter become organized
It’s not the Gods but Goldilocks
The chaotic Cosmos is now alive.
Zero probability happens sometimes!
With aeons,
Thousands of dendritic branches light up
With a thick forest of leafless tree-like cells
Sinaptically igniting chemical processes
At the base of long axon trunks.
Oh, my!
What am I
But a malleable piece of Universe
Emerging from atomic star dust?
Oh, my!
What am I
But a fleeting conscious mind
Emerging from intrinsic neural patterns?
Or am I just a flammable dream in a world on fire?
There’s an old Algonquin legend
– Which I hope I will tell right –
About the creator, Nanabozho
Living high up in the sky.
He chose to live far North
Too far to be discerned
But there he lit a fire
Which brightly crackled and burned.
And from those blazing sparks
Were born the seas of northern lights
That flood the empty atmosphere
On cold dark winter nights
To remind all of humanity
That even from those heights
He has not forgotten them
Even though he’s out of sight.
I don’t pretend to be a good person it’s just that
sometimes it’s hard to breathe
as if there were smoke in my lungs
watching catastrophes unfold on live TV
insomniac, in a city where nobody knows my name
staring out the window late at night
staring into the window at the world passing me by
burning up in the face of insignificance
so much of life is spent sitting around and waiting to die
or waiting for the the collapse of contemporary society, should be any day now and then
it’s over, nothing to cry about but
ever so rarely, in the early hours of the morning
when I dare to let myself dream
I see the world, when it was still new
before we hollowed it out to make our toy cars zoom around the tracks and
built our plastic cities, big gray teeth reaching up
to devour the sky
I can breathe again, in the untainted air of the dawn before time
I bathe naked in the ancient water
under a canopy of young stars
and prehistoric trees
I lie curled up on my side in the primordial grass, like a child
and I weep, God
I weep
Like a tiny spaceship crawling
In zigzag frantically from one flower
To the next, the iridescent blue
Green walking ocean carries the world on its back,
Tries to find its way to the sky…
Revolves around the light mauve petals, follows the blue ribbon…
Stops
Above the title:
A Garden Eden. Masterpieces of Botanical Illustration
Cautiously rubs its front legs clean
Then its small dark face.
Through the magnifying glass,
I zoom into the Australian waters
Of your shell: The Great barrier reef rises from the ashes…
– Announcement on the radio:
…Recent Data from NASA’s satellites show that
Antarctica is losing ice mass at an average rate of 600 meters per day… –
The window was left open… Why didn’t you spread your steel blue wings
To escape?
Did you mistake these paper flowers for reality?
Beautiful flying lucky charm, God’s messenger, last
Hope feeding on Angel’s tears,
Why did you stay under the lens and let the sun
Burn you to death?