I have jettisoned You,
Bowing instead to the hallowed depths of space
Deep beyond imagining,
Beyond the great walls of flotsam
that we call galaxies,
beyond the galaxies’ own stars and exo-planets,
beyond Earth.
I bow to Earth’s ocean depths,
Gravid with life and the possibility of life,
and lives past, archived and solidified on the ocean floor,
Archived and layered
Together with signature layers
from ancient tsunami surges and meteor strikes.
I bow to water, the sacred lubricant of life,
present in all cells, my cells, and
the very stuff of rainbow
that vanishes even as I speak,
even as water molecules in it spin away.
My soul does not magnify You.
And yet, when systems in this
Strangely orderly universe
Go savagely awry
Looping in some fit of intensifying feedback,
When whirling centrifuges spit wartime victims out
like broken teeth from a fractured jaw,
How will this victim walk forward
without solid belief?
Without the encouragement that
I am Seen,
My suffering acknowledged,
My path destined to be a thread through improbable events
in a way that seems willed,
Destined to be a cord pulling me onward,
freely offering up hope
with sparks of goodness to warm me,
And at the end,
Someone to thank?
[If brought up Buddhist, would I even know to think this?]
[My war survivor friend Hubert says, “When I accepted that everything is absurd, I felt much better.” Permanently disillusioned, he is yet full of cheerful effort.]
Trudy Myrrh Reagan is a poet, visual artist, and a co-founder of the group, YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology. She is a member of Palo Alto Friends Meeting (PYM).