“Creation of Man” by Michelangelo – Sistine Chapel
by grace of God
I live and breathe
how well or ill
He leaves to me
From my book Bohemian Scents
Creation
All posts tagged Creation
“The Touch” by Elizabeth Chapman
motion in motion
swirled turns of the air
bend straight lines
corrupt stillness
destination is
movement alive
with geometry
place but a placename
location a notion
no here and no there
inertia the illusion of
standing one’s ground
against progress when
progress is constant
every man all alone
in his mind on a path
every path a distortion
of spatial intelligence
measured by wishes
a traveler’s enigma
compelled by a force
not in need of consent
the momentum of
angular mechanics
a world whose inhabitants
ever observers inside
a perpetual motion
can never know joy
of a physically
fixed sense of place
and yet find themselves
cast as explorers
intent to gaze inwardly
eyes full of solitude
deep with discovery
learning their way
to the every last spot
of creation
the gifts of existence
that sprang from a touch
by the fingers of God
****************************
“Yet it is in this loneliness that the deepest activities begin. It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity.” – Thomas Merton
“Underwater River Rocks” by Dixie Distefano
brooding stones suffer anger
ignored by the sun beneath waters
too rushed to give them a care
left to wallow in mud of neglect
all their prettiness lost to admiring
eyes of the world noticed only by
coldblooded philistine fish with
their miniscule brain-hearts too
full of themselves nothing left
but to wait for the next glacier
era to scrape them from dull
deep obscurity raising them back
to their freed rightful place among
nature’s own objets de vertu
derisively flaunting their sheer
indestructible lifeless antiquity
mocking pathetic mortality
walking the crests of creation
From my book Bohemian Scents
Carina Nebula as Captured by the Hubble Telescope
Secrets of creation hide deep in conflation
Of science with faith, of corpus with wraith,
Discrete bits of essence, immune from senescence,
That mark each warm creature, or cold lifeless feature,
Of all the known world, plus those unknown, thus hurled
Through vastness of space, push-pulled in their chase
By grave forces, unseen, save by eyes utmost keen
As detectors of naught, who find nothingness caught
By the physics of sleight, in mathematical light,
Racing outward, away from a focal array,
From a radiant heart that outburst apart
With the first stroke of time, Divine in its prime.
Before that release, all was soundless still peace,
When all matter, all dust, was consigned to the trust
Of that heart, then mere speck, the one salient check
Against stark eternity, charged with modernity,
Then, slowly it swelled, its inertia unquelled,
Now a tumescent part that grew into that heart
Whose eruption destroyed the limitless void,
And sent forth material, mixed with ethereal
Substance that surged, until order emerged
That conformed to base laws, posed by God as first cause,
And the cosmos took form in a most perfect storm
Whose primordial strife gave way to first life.
From my book Range of Motion
“Thus Spake Zarathustra” by Yury Fomichev
insatiable hunger of galaxies
driven to swallow each other
mad parsecs of mayhem
where trillions of stars
clash in vehement chaos
colliding destroying creating
recombinant violent things
new morphologies drawn
into volatile vacuums
that radically alter the
blood-gas of gravity
churning the was and the is
until notions of sameness
no longer obtain
cosmic rudiments torn
then rebonded reborn
black holes seething
reform into one singularity
lusting to deepen the warp
that would steepen the curve
giving spacetime its sway
inorganic materials
swarm in mad storms
of a seminal stardust
celestial wombs heave
with mysterious matter
grown angry and urgent
astronomy taken to tantrum
miasma inducing vast
indistinct spasms of nebulae
blackened and bruised
by the paradox force of
destructive creation
a brutal nativity given to
fierce cataclysmic explosions
in yield of atomical quanta
among which an infinitesimal
number of pieces give seed
to astonishing molecules
building block elements
marked by a rare bizarre
spark of potential for life
by such spawn of congenital
virtues of violence
we came to exist
and by being we came
to the thinking
and thought led to wonder
why we in our nature
behave with such cruelty
killing ourselves with
remorseless abandon
as if self-destruction
were hard-wired instinct
till wonder gave worry
and worry self-loathing
and here have we come
with our moral inventions
in love and in hate of a God
in our furious turns
testing ethics to pacify urges
subdue mitochondrial menace
yet failing by any true measure
and here have we come
to the brink of a nihilist fate
bloody garments our hairshirts
of ignorance not understanding
why some are so bad
yet uncomfortably certain
why some are so good
we appear to know less
than we knew in the cave
when the clan and the tribe
in their smallnesses
simplified choices
and rarely would make
a mistake more than once
and here have we come
to confront whom we are
our ugly incongruous selves
inconspicuous specks
in a universe troubled by
nature that stems from a
ruthless ancestral calamity
nucleotides flawed with
terrible nuance of
vicious propensity
slipped into primitive cells
and asserted themselves
co-dependent with acids
benign in defining identity
and here have we come
blest and cursed
good and evil within our
most ancient deep creases
of cosmic dichotomy
life in itself one long chance
to earn grace or damnation
**********************************
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”
– Friedrich Nietzsche
Hubble Image of Horsehead Nebula
new worlds in the birthing
heaving gases and dust
extinguished of light
cosmic plasmas suspended
in winds that shape wombs
with a delicate privacy
inside the mind of creation
From my book Pieces of Wine
“Pillars of Creation” – Photo by Hubble Telescope
Secrets of creation hide deep in conflation
Of science with faith, of corpus with wraith,
Discrete bits of essence, immune from senescence,
That mark each warm creature, or cold lifeless feature,
Of all the known world, plus those unknown, thus hurled
Through vastness of space, push-pulled in their chase
By grave forces, unseen, save by eyes utmost keen
As detectors of naught, who find nothingness caught
By the physics of sleight, in mathematical light,
Racing outward, away from a focal array,
From a radiant heart that outburst apart
With the first stroke of time, Divine in its prime.
Before that release, all was soundless still peace,
When all matter, all dust, was consigned to the trust
Of that heart, then mere speck, the one salient check
Against stark eternity, charged with modernity,
Then, slowly it swelled, its inertia unquelled,
Now a tumescent part that grew into that heart
Whose eruption destroyed the limitless void,
And sent forth material, mixed with ethereal
Substance that surged, until order emerged
That conformed to base laws, posed by God as first cause,
And the cosmos took form in a most perfect storm
Whose primordial strife gave way to first life.
(originally posted here April 2013 – written years before)
“Planetary Plasmas” by Richard Ortolano
a lone singularity
infinite density
temporal spatial
dimensions as yet
nonexistent sheer
numberless absence
of space and of place
quantum vacuum
mathematically moribund
paradox of a particulate God
life and matter ex nihilo
cunningly curvingly
dovetailed to fit relativity
bent by uncertainty
Einstein and Heisenberg
iconoclastic in neat
intellectual joinery
only to find they’ve been
rendered asunder when
come to great clash with
arcane modern notions
of lawless invisible motion
a chaos of vibrating strings
singing cyclical songs of
expansion contraction
ethereal inhales and exhales
replete cosmogenesis
parallel opposite worlds
full of opposite parallel minds
time in omni-directional course
unpredictably carried by chance
forward backward and sideways
perhaps all is ever and always
an infinite multiverse
able to procreate gravity branes
who suspend every universe
each in its own isolation
or possibly even
produce countless
self-contained bubbles
discrete of existence
expanding for all of eternity
each cosmic entity destined
to never perceive any other
yet all must perforce face
the very same question
will time before time
be resolved and revealed
by theology steeped in
a fluid forensic philosophy
or will it happen that
better-made pictures
emerge from a faith in
untamed theoretical physics
“Creation” by OneLifeOneArt
light appeared
divine instant
an infinite spark
cosmic womb
bearing life
from the void
a beginning
of numberless
edifications
perpetual motion
of stillness
from nothing
an everything
filling the
endlessness
empathic spaces
that quicken
the depth and
the breadth
of all time
light appeared
divine instant
an infinite spark
generations
commenced
seven days
of eternity
* * *
“These are the generations (toledoth) of the heavens and the earth when they were created.” – Genesis 2:4
“Sea of Dreams” by Duncan George and Adrian Gray
search the stone
seek the soul
of the universe
feel the cool
silent wisdom
the knowledge
acquired from
aeons of witness
the birth pangs
attending the
every beginning
the traumas
ensuing the
every extinction
the stone
ever present
observer the
chronicler keeping
the stories and
stains of existence
the secrets of
cosmic creation
the seminal truths
urging mutable time
lodged inside its
hard heart where
they wait even now
as they’ve waited
so long for the
curious mind of the
first honest man
* * *
“A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.” – Andy Goldsworthy
Poesy plus Polemics 