As Copernicus turned the earth
toward heaven, a new doubt
emerged: did your faith depend
upon dew-laden eastern breezes,
a shepherd’s song, a flood of tears,
ground shaken at the mantle, bereft
machine-turning, Western, free?



Perhaps had ironclads sunk Darwin’s tale
you would feel special yet?
Emerging in passerine wings
a lofty flight of questioning
wonder: how we are reconciled
in love without commissioning?
Yet — love’s heart — humans tried.



Factory girls matchbox schooled,
ground by force as true as fields,
no magnets mourned the world disenchanted,
‘till time could bend and now / then / still
finer minds could not say
what is real.



Curious as cats in boxes facing
Turing’s universal maker:
factory cogs to poppy fields,
stars’ harness and unification of wills.
No distance on earth for evasion,
no heavenly gap left for explanation;
Man’s authority — the right kind of man -
in reason evolved unreason,
in liberation only consumption,
in celebrity forsaken worship,
longer living in death’s grip of
anxiety, absurd but still…
still… You and I…
we see the flicker:
the light of hope
diminished, not yet
extinguished.