I live in awe of the lightning storm.
White pillars, built by mad men,
Falling faster than Babel from
The marble firmament.
Explosions rock this tiny world
And suns are born to die in eye-blinks
Leaving behind some pale after-image--
A ghost that haunts your retinal wall.
I never cowered but tried to comfort
My dog as she would whimper
Deep beneath the divan in
The drawing room, poor thing, helpless.
So, I crawled in
There beside her
(I was smaller then than I was now)
And sought to hold her close to me.
She started, then she snarled;
A low growl to warn me off,
And silence as I crawled back out--
Her cave was not for sharing.
The rain came down in punctuations,
Sheets of commas, inverted, doubled--
The sky is quoting space and time
And I am witnessing
The birth of something new
Yet older than us all--
The bathing of the newborn Earth.
Emerging from the mud,
Scarred by spades and slick with tar,
It shivers and it gasps.
But babies are born despite their sighs.
And so go on forever
The lightning and the storm
And the Earth and the space between
And the suns and the babies,
But not my dog.
She died at two years old.
She stopped as the world moved on
In narrower ellipses...
