The World is Full of Mystery, and Wonder
The force that drives the green fuse of a flower
the force that orders my atoms
in such fashion that I am blessed with consciousness
the force that turns
ancient cosmic wheels.
Are these forces one, or many?
Walking in late spring along a country path
to enter a meadow strewn with dead leaves.
Dead leaves in May? Passing through them,
the leaves rise up in a great cloud, dead brown
surface mutating to sky blue iridescence beneath:
thousands of fluttering butterflies
disturbed in their ritual.
Sitting crosslegged at a cliffedge in October
still for many morning minutes, grokking
weather patterns, feeling the unseasonable sun
warming the rocks. From the corner of an eye
movement
a slithering
suddenly snakes are everywhere, come forth
from a cliffedge viperpit for a last taste of summer.
Rubber boas, garters, rattlesnakes
willing to share the sun's bounty but timid,
slipping back into cracks at the wave of a hand.
What to make of week when
every time,
standing beneath a tree, sitting on a porch
a look up reveals a fat black body
with scarlet hourglass, a black widow spider
dangling by a thread overhead?
And how did the labourious removal
of iron from an aspen-ringed fairy glade
lead to the spontaneous uprising
of millions of mushrooms?
To ponder is to wonder
to ponder more closely, and longer
is to grow the wonder.
Ignorance growing greater
with greater knowledge and experience.
Robert Douglas Hickey |
