Entreaty
In edifices uninviting and nondescript
we reluctantly contemplate the pandemic,
widespread yet incommunicable,
of loneliness, pneumatic sinkhole
sundering I from Thou,
a societal toxemia manifest in the blood work
of a languishing generation.
Quarantine is the disease;
we agonize from throes, terrified
and ashamed to be trembling
from an angst existential, from the epiphany
that our center, after all, will not hold.
Let us concur to barter surrenders.
Covenant with me to bridge divides
out of mutual compassion;
we are each other’s wardens and liberators both,
and dangle the keys that release
solitude’s hostages from bondage.
How easily greetings rekindle the tinder
of hope, stimulating embers;
transferred warmth enlivens the moribund
and allays the weary
who momentarily disremember
the consummate ache of isolation.
The Tangled Skein
Exhausted of doxologies, the thoughtful suspire
plaints and doubts, spurred by the urge for truth,
eager to identify veridical strands from the morass
of beliefs and opinions about our existential quandary,
deep waters ventured solely by those who refuse
to indefinitely remain mired in misprision,
who have experienced each in their turn
faith, skepticism, disbelief,
and are ever unnerved by the possibility
of a universe amoral and arational,
by the helices of history that so often seem to us
intolerably desultory and esoteric.
We admit to being at times disinterested yet
never objective; always we weigh equiprobable
notions in our cosmic calculus, keen to perceive
the seams of existence evincing a seamer,
longing to dispel uncertainties, anxious to calm
the gnawing angst in our midst.
Somehow we live with qualms and contradictions;
we recognize the geology of truth and its substrata.
Whoever would our world inspect for intellect,
design, purpose, or meaning by definition
braves an array of questions unanswerable
and considerations unsettling reality itself,
unweaving the fabric of the known
for the sake of glimpsing behind the curtain.
What is science but the art of detecting
hints and clues that reveal piecemeal
prints and marks concealed yet ultimately traceable
to a retiring originator most comfortable
cloaked amid shadow?
We are brazen; the darkness is not for us.
So we comb, quest, and seek without surcease,
just in case.
After all, who among us could forgo the chance
to goad the inexcusably withdrawn and demand
just what the big idea is, anyway?
On the Wings of the Wind
On the wings of the wind I heard it said
that the testimony of the senses
skims the surface of awareness,
below which lurk depths unfathomed;
that each effluence conveys subcurrents
destined for their hour in the sun;
that time ironizes human conceit,
humbling the insouciant who whistle past cemeteries;
that we must never fear the whelming unknown
but ever renew our existential vocation,
reducing ignorance, limiting the unfamiliar,
until we intuit unmistakable patterns,
till we perceive and discern, against all odds,
a memento of presence amidst absence;
that the only sane philosophers are part-timers,
all others culminating in trammels, raving in asylums;
that dysphoria prompts opportunity,
and myriad realia were only lately unimaginable;
that luck is a trickster impish and dumb,
and progress unhelpful if it but hastens us headlong
over the precipice;
that humankind endures despite staggering ignorance,
in the face of pitiful feebleness;
even the Almighty, some may say,
never proved such valor;
dear friends, all this and more I swear I heard said
on the wings of the wind.