Classic Poem

Curious how they all look alike
at this distance — about eighty yards.
Individuals resolve
into the species. There is man — his young —
eyried on blankets under an apple tree
on a steep pasture. Curious,
in this bird, the domed cranium with three dots —
two eyes, one mouth — for receiving and
transmitting signals. O beware
those three dark dots, for they have pried
into the atom's heart, predicted stars,
fathomed the sun's furnace, violated the moon.

Any clumsy beast could crush them:
delicate, pale-as-anemone shells
under the apple tree, listening
to their own private thunders — the imprisoned Sea;
the labors of mountains; tread of Tyrannosaurus,
of the Mastodon, the ages and races of Men ...

And clumsy beast — but none is left. O
beware those three triangulating dots, you
behemoths, tigers, wolves, hiding
in your constricting jungles. Are no claws
keen as that intellectual ordnance. It
will herd you coolly onto sharpened stakes
in a pitfall, truss you with hidden nets,
flick bullets through your heart.

Now they are looking this way — three
children of Man. What will they do?
Devour these fields? Reach up and pluck the moon?
Burn me to a cinder in dimensionless cyclotrons
of their minds? Or sing me a little song
of Gypsies and Spring?

It is very difficult to predict.
Anthropologists write about Man;
but as often Man will turn unaccountably and write
about Anthropologists, making it moot
who is classifying whom.

It is unsettling, but
in each skull
crackles a Universe.











By permission of the author.