JOHNMICHAEL SIMON POETRY

Like balls of wool unraveling we’ve traced the ways

of ancestors, scrolls hidden deep in clay, inscriptions

entombed in pyramids, paintings on cave walls

 

We’ve probed the languages of rocks, clues left in cataclysm’s camera by fossils flashing between

glacier and volcano, shards from ancient flues

 

We’ve leaped the chasm between legend and collision theory watched reconstructions of four billion years found whispers in a comet’s heart that no-one hears

 

My neighbor’s son who’s been to a yeshiva tells me its

a heathen myth, how studying the writings is the only road

learned minds span centuries discovering the bible’s width

 

And yet despite holy and unholy research, observations, calculations, om-chanting and such, we somehow fail to see how we’ve progressed that much as answers lead to

 

Further questions, theories collapse and in the end we’re unconvinced and still conclude perhaps.  Yet if we’re lucky, think good thoughts, become aware it’s an illusion that

 

We’re at the center of all things, there’ll come a fusion

quite uninvited, out on a walk, listening to trees or watching a bird wondering how it flies when suddenly

 

You know it’s all connected forest, sky and you. Your fingertips stretch over oceans reach beyond the stars and for a brilliant second, every dark and dusky doorway

 

Opens a teasing fraction from afar – just for a second then it’s over but you know it’s there.  So when you step out into darkness at the speed of light

                   

Your fingertips and mine will touch and glow

like candles in the night