The Sunday Poem: Life & Love
Life is not sacred. It is precious.
There is a difference: the world
Cheerfully slaughters the innocent,
The accidental, the promising.
Each blade of grass is life;
Each microbe on a grain of sand.
Each blastocyst, each parasite,
Each recombinant acid bit.
Each set of neurons firing,
Each varied, vertiginous
Set of senses, inchoate reactions,
Pathways burned through myelin.
Thin-veined leaves uncurling spring,
Each water-cupping hydrozoa,
Human fingers questing for a touch –
Not special. Just marvelous.
Mourning, we mourn the instance.
Not webs of cells, mitochondriae,
The symbiotes that link
The web of life from us to them.
We mourn instead intangibles:
The days not gone by, completing
Each other’s thoughts, the dance
Of neurons mirroring.
These are intentions, not blind
Questing, not propagation
Creeping its way across the blank.
These are bounds beyond biology.
There is a difference: the world
Knows life as tumbles of succession,
Accidental promising. But love – ah,
Love is not precious. It is sacred.
– May 20th, 2007
3 Responses to “The Sunday Poem: Life & Love”
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Hello Raph,
Longtime fan, first time poster.
For god’s sake, never write poetry when you’re feeling poetic. Otherwise it sounds like a fifteen-year old Goth girl protesting a timeout in in her black-painted bedroom. I say this, because I care.
Meantime, please could you write up something we really do want to read, specifically a blow-by-blow account of how SOE so royally screwed up SWG, a story that should cover everything from soup-to-nuts, and post it anonymously somewhere accessible on the Web where it can be read. No, I don’t care about NDAs.
Sincerely,
Alex
What’s wrong with 15 year old goth-girls? I like the poem,
the entry and exit lines are predictable, but if they
capture a moment, then they are doing their job.
I interpret these poems as “diary” like mood captures,
which is what makes them charming. A “calculated” poem miss that charm.
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