Classic Poem

Above all, what is it?
It is not literature,
though it has its rhetoric. ... Say
a legal document. But
(or therefore) a moral one:
... to form a more perfect Union ...
secure the Blessings of Liberty ...
(all those inalienables of person and property
declared for at Independence). A kind
of juridical I Ching , then:
a book that is not a book
but a living being, or
in this case a hall full, a convention;
and to be consulted (if not
conjured with: six pages,
a hexagram of a sort!) Ah, Fathers,
do you gavel for sanity still,
or again, in a wilderness
of binary numbers and mono-
manias, a nuclear autumn
of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD)?
Or are these the bill coming in
for the Old Wilderness, killed off
and logged off and sold off
because there was no reason
to doubt the illimitable bounty
of a continent, a world, a Future?
Fathers, is it too late
to broaden the scope of the inquiry? —
Toward the mouse and the atom;
toward the whales and the stars; finally
to the mind that inquires — to
its reasons, to Reason itself?