“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
God
All posts tagged God
“Autumn Evening” by Letitia Smith-Burnett
dovecotes emit oblique octaves
as corn-yellow sun settles down
among lavender raiment of sky
plaintive lyrics of homing at close
of the wearying day carried high
inside soughs of domestic retreat
over pole-barns and stables where
livestock relax into reverence and
farmhouse beds settle in prayers
every day is a blessing of labors to
gratify yearnings of body and soul
what the minor key birdsong of
psalms understands even better
than voices of husbands and wives
caught up worrying work yet undone
From my books Bohemian Scents and Legacies (vol. 1)
“The Three Metamorphoses” by Werner Horvath
(Regarding Friedrich Nietzsche)
nihilist superman
angry at the timid
derived the moralities
of master and slave
virtue personalized
making each man a
godself unchurched
disabused of all limits
imposed by humanity
sheer will to power
revered as the life-force
that animates nature
perspectivist intellect
smashed all divine and
mundane objectivity
burying thinkers from
Plato to Kant with
a soil that celebrates
relative subjective man
in a state of vainglory
incarnate all leading
directly to why this
iconoclast died in the
mesmer of madness
From my books Bohemian Scents and Legacies (vol. 1)
“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
“Imperfection” by Jen Evenhus
what sins have been mine
I’ve done no more and no less
than to be human
wasn’t that the grand design
manifest imperfection
Painting by Thomas Moran
backbone of continents
bearing the consequent
burdens of staging all life
monumental with force
of emergent creation
thrust up through the
mineral soils and oxygen
skin of an agnostic planet
it renders support for the
roof of the world here
where spirits collect and
cavort above clouds in the
mists from which tumbling
headwater sources find
downpour in cataracts
rushing to feed mighty
rivers and watersheds
lofty divides between
cultures and characteristic
geographies heavy with
height of intrinsically
idiosyncratic composition
inorganic yet very much
alive having more than
once moved cataclysmically
marking the eons that men
would eventually learn
to call eras while naming
these mountains their first
solemn objects of worship
through countless millennia
minds trained so long on such
heights would inevitably
come to recognize God
From my book Ephemera
“Albert Einstein” by Aaron Kizer
Using only the eyes of a beautiful mind
Through the lens of theoretical physics
He discerned mathematical expressions
Of existence, of power, of motion
He sought out among the heavenly orbs
For invisible forces that impel them
That arrange control of their synchrony
He imagined a rule-governed universe
Of interdependent elements captured
By one simple Grand Unified Theory
Whose equally simple equation would solve
Every What? Where? When? How? and Why?
Compelled by persistent unsleeping reason
Alas his astonishing intellect never
Did reach that one theory of everything
But in course his magnificent affluent failure
Revealed secret arcane apparatus of nature
Whose exposure forever altered all science
He found and stepped right through a powerful door
To an undulant space-time continuum
Treading upon the Lorentzian intervals
Challenging Minkowski symmetries
He discovered systemic distortions that pushed him
To reshape the world with his stunning
Theories of Special and General Relativity
Among vast phenomena his work informed
Are quantum mechanics and nuclear fission,
String particle waves and thermodynamics,
Cosmological constants, space-warping of time,
Wormholes and black holes and bending of light
In fact, every postulate physicists frame
Still feeds on the fruits of his Annus Mirabilis
Yet he always believed he had failed in his quest
For essential connection that unified all
But successors continue nearing his goal
With new confident formulae joining
Weak nuclear force to electromagnetics
In seductive electroweak symmetry
While continuing search for a still farther bridge
Between outlying strong forces binding the fate
Of gravity with quantum chromodynamics
But science progresses with untidy spasms
That clench or release unpredictably timed
To splatter its knowledge on spatial and temporal
Manifestations of human ideas
Physics was born of mathematics and philosophy
Two-thousand years from Ptolemy to Copernicus
Two hundred more brought the polyhistor Newton
Another two fifty till Einstein arrived
No one else in those spans mattered much if at all
These four were the founders of order, reorder
And structure, restructure of all the known world
They gave their bright lights to the gods of the sky
Each more dazzling in turn chasing more and more
Darkness from the precincts of human endeavor
But beyond all the others what Einstein achieved
Gave a light so exquisitely bright it reveals
Those invisible paths his successors now follow
Theoretical thoroughfares leading to truth’s
Complete wisdom God enabled man to acquire
*************************************************
“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”
– Albert Einstein, in “Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium”, 1941
Books by Einstein recommended for reading:
On the Special and General Theory of Relativity
On the Method of Theoretical Physics
Einstein’s God
The World as I See It
Out of My Later Years
(originally posted March 2013)
Higgs Boson Illustration
God has won the Nobel
elementary particle physics
rejoices by dancing
to strains of electro-weak music
with Einstein’s long suffering ghost
in the church of the Hadron Collider
they tangoed and jitterbugged
down the main tubular aisle
past the bone-happy tombs
of dear Fermi and Feynman
right up to the quantum field altar
and placed the found boson
with paradigm reverence
within the ark safekeep of their
divine wrought Standard Model
already containing
the seeds of the stars
(originally posted October 2013)
“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)
Painting by David Mensing
I’ve used the phrase often
not with small purpose
when nature resplendent
unfolds into view
breathtaking with grace
where bluebonnet skies
clutching billowed chiffons
meet with lavender rolls
that upholster the earth
between sepia seams
edging emerald forests
and purple-gray foothills
ascending cool slopes
capped by eggshells and pearls
where air has clean taste
scrubbed by fingers of breeze
and waters clear smell
sparkling salted or pure
to imbibe and intoxicate
quickening species
robust and refreshed
through connection by brisk
elemental comingling
of molecules built from
stray bits of far stars
coalesced by the livening
rays of the sun
(originally posted April 2013)
Poesy plus Polemics 