Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Something About


Something about a mountain teaches a foot to fly.

Something about a river teaches an arm to swim.

Something about a stone teaches a hand to build.

Something about a tree teaches a mind to climb.

Something about a friend teaches a body to sing.

3 comments:

Dr. Mike said...

Dear Lucretius

You set to verse your atomic theory, scientifically analyzing Nature as if discussing pixilation in a Seurat painting. Only when depicting horses dying in a plague did you become interesting, overtaken by a mad Vedic vision that opened earth to a chaos of neutrons, These days, science has split the atom and found even tinier components to being. They swim like dark specks in a squinting eyeball succumbing to macular degeneration.

The Latin professor loved to hold class early enough to hear the chimes from McMicken Hall. The sounds were fake, prerecorded on magnetic tape and played to recall the original ones that had been ripped from the throat of the university tower. Then he would rise and lock the classroom door, so no late students could get in. “Isn’t it amazing how right Lucretius was,” the teacher beamed as we slugged through another hundred lines of didactic atoms in motion, “without having recourse to labs or modern equipment.”

The Cold War was still on, and we lived in fear of nuclear annihilation at any minute. That may have been why I did not appreciate reading your scientific texts set to verse. If there was no guarantee of tomorrow, the only thing I could fall back on was what was happening today, and live for the present. Besides, I found no poetic beauty in your objective speculations, only a world decimated into random particles careening through space as everything collapsed into entropy. Even the sun was no metaphor for illumination, but rather for radiation and death.

Ah, but at that point the door to the classroom rattled, and a beautiful female, who was also a French major, insisted on being admitted. Finally somebody else had arrived for the professor to pick on. I settled back in my seat and enjoyed watching motes dance in the rest of the morning light.

No thanks to you,

Dr. Mike
[Disposable Prose Poem October 6, 2009]

roughterrain crane said...

The nice autumn photo.
Oct 3rd, we saw the harvest moon which is believed to be the most beautiful in east Asia.

HK Stewart said...

Thank you, RTC. I took that photo at an arboretum in a nearby state park. My wife and I go there a lot, often with camera in hand.

I'm glad you enjoyed the Harvest Moon. The night was overcast here, but we knew the moon was there anyway.

H. K.