We had been by no means promised any of it — this world of cottonwoods and clouds — when the Large Bang set the doable in movement. And but right here we’re, atoms with consciousness, every of us a dwelling improbability solid of chaos and useless stars. Kids of likelihood, we now have made ourselves into what we’re — creatures who can see a universe of magnificence within the feather of a hen and may flip a blind eye to one another’s struggling, creatures able to the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope.
A era after Maya Angelou held up a cosmic mirror to humanity with “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Pattiann Rogers — who writes with unusual virtuosity in regards to the intersection of the cosmic and the human, and whose poems have due to this fact been a frequent presence in The Universe in Verse — gives a poignant cosmogony of our self-creation within the gorgeous closing poem of her ebook Flickering (public library).
HOMO SAPIENS: CREATING THEMSELVES
by Pattiann RogersI.
Shaped within the black-light middle of a star-circling
galaxy; fashioned in whirlpool pictures of froth
and flume and fulcrum; within the middle picture of herring
circling like items of silver swirling quick, a shoaling
circle of deception; within the whirlpool fragrance of intercourse
within the deepest curve of a lily’s mushy corolla. Created
throughout the pictures of the creator’s creation.Born with the identical grimacing wrench of a tree-covered
cliff cut up large all of a sudden by lightning and opened
to thundering clouds of hail and rain.Cured in the summertime solar as if in a potter’s oven,
polished like a stone rolled by a river, emboldened
by the picture of the expanse past earth’s horizon,
inside and outdoors a circumference within the picture
of freedom.Given the picture of starlight clusters steadily silent
above a hillside-silence of fallen snow… let there be sleep.II.
Inheriting from the earth’s scrambling minions,
pictures of thorn and bur, fang and claw, stealth,
deceit, poison, camouflage, blade, and blood…
let there be struggling, let there be survival.Formed by the picture of the onset and unstoppable
devouring eclipse of the solar, the tempestuous, ecliptic
consuming of the moon, the volcanic explosions of burning
rocks and fiery hail of ashes to dying… let there be
terror and tears. Let there be pity.Created within the picture of concern inside a crawfish
skittering backward by means of a freshwater stream
with all eight appendages in good coordination,
each pincers held excessive, backing into security beneath
a fallen leaf refuge… let there be residence.III.
Made within the picture of the moon, the place else
would the title of ivory rock craters shine
besides in our eyes… let there be language.Displayed within the picture of the rotting seed
on the identical stem with the swelling blossom…
let there be hope.Homo sapiens creating themselves after the style
and picture of the creator’s ongoing creation — slowly,
eventual, alert and imagined, composing, dissembling,
till the suitable chord sounds from one courageous strum
of the suitable strings reverberating, fading away
like night… let there be pathos, let there be
compassion, forbearance, forgiveness. Let there be
weightless magnificence.Of earth and sky, Homo sapiens creating themselves,
following the mode and mannequin of the creator’s creation,
particle by particle, quest by quest, witness by witness,
regardless that the unknown distant and the unknown
close by be seen and never seen… let there be goodwill
and accounting, let there be reward resounding.
Complement with astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s ode to darkish matter and the thriller of being, “Let There Always Be Light,” non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson’s astonishing “Center of the Universe,” and Jane Hirshfield’s “To Be a Person,” then revisit Pattiann Rogers’s harmonic of the human and cosmic perspectives, learn by David Byrne and illustrated by Maira Kalman.
