Poems about Science 5: Evolution

POEMS ABOUT SCIENCE 5: EVOLUTION Fly’s Eyes by Michael R. Burch Inhibited, dark agile fly along paint-peeling sills, up to the bright glass drawn by radiance compounded thousandfold,— I do not see the same as you, but hold antenna to the brilliant pane of life and buzz bewilderedly. In your belief the world outside is “as it is” because you see it clearly, windowed without flaws, you err. I see strange terrors in the glass— dead airless bubbles light can never pass without distortion, fingerprints that blur the sun itself. No, nothing here is clear. You see the earth distinct, eyes “open wide.” It only seems that way, unmagnified. They Take Their Shape by Michael R. Burch We will not forget... the moments of silence and the days of mourning, the bells that swung from leaden-shadowed vents to copper bursts above “hush!”-chastened children who saw the sun break free (abandonment to run and laugh forsaken for the moment), still flashing grins they could not quite repent... Nor should they—anguish triumphs just an instant; this every child accepts; the nymphet weaves; transformed, the grotesque adult-thing emerges: damp-winged, huge-eyed, to find the sun deceives... But children know; they spin limpwinged in darkness cocooned in hope—the shriveled chrysalis that paralyzes time. Suspended, dreaming, they do not fall, but grow toward what is, then grope about to find which transformation might best endure the light or dark. “Survive” becomes the whispered mantra of a pupa’s awakening ... till What takes shape and flies shrieks, parroting Our own shrill, restive cries. Longing by Michael R. Burch We stare out at the cold gray sea, overcome with such sudden and intense longing: our eyes meet, inviolate, and we are not of this earth, this strange, inert mass. Before we crept out of the shoals of the inchoate sea, before we grew the quaint appendages and orifices of love... before our jellylike nuclei, struggling to be hearts, leapt at the sight of that first bright, oracular sun, then watched it plummet, the birth and death of our illumination... before we wept... before we knew... before our unformed hearts grew numb, again, in the depths of the sea’s indecipherable darkness... When we were only a swirling profusion of recombinant things wafting loose silt from the sea’s soft floor, writhing and sucking in convulsive beds of mucousy foliage, flowering, flowering, flowering... what jolted us to life? Keywords: earth, sun, life #AI #MRBSCIENCE