photo credit: Teri Petz, http://www.worksofbeauty.ca

Hello dear friends, on this cold day on traditional Blackfoot territory, on the New Moon just two days after Imbolc, Candlemas, feast day of St. Brigid, and Ground Hog Day!  An auspicious time, for sure.

Today I offer you my most recent poem.  I hope it adds to your wonder at our weird, marvelous, suffering world:

Dinosaur in My Living Room, Sunshine in My Heart

Have you ever realized that everything,

and I mean EVERYTHING

in the universe is the same set of elements

mixed together in a myriad of ways,

breaking down, coming together in new combinations,

moving together and apart, in some bizarre cosmic dance?

 

As someone who doesn’t like my food touching on the plate,

that’s not immediately an attractive thought.

I hear my mother (and now my spouse, and

increasingly, my son) saying

“Don’t worry about it.  It all get mixed up in your stomach anyway.”

And visions of supper thrown into a blender dance in my head.

Yuck.

 

But I digress. . .

 

Think of it:

At the Big Bang (don’t you just love those

serious scientific names that physicists use?)

at the Big Bang, everything,

all of material reality,

every atom that is,

is compacted together  (like my supper in the blender. . . . )

 

And then,

at the self-appointed moment,

or at a word from the gods,

what has been squished, the singularity,

dislocates into movement and pattern.

and to make a long story short,

here we are!

 

I saw it yesterday in my living room:

I saw the atoms and molecules,

sand (that is, silicon chips)

and dinosaurs (the plastic made from oil made from decayed carbon life forms)

all coming together, creating THIS computer on

the stool next to dear spouse’s favorite chair.

 

Dinosaurs re-formed so that I can not only touch them, now,

but reach into the internet to learn about them.

 

And those dinosaurs were formed from the plants, the other animals,

the dirt they ate,

and the plants grew not only from soil

filled with little bugs, stones, and metals,

but from the sunshine itself

nourishing the plant through photosynthesis.

 

This Chromebook holds the water of millions of years of rainclouds

nourishing the plants nourishing the animals that decayed,

making the oil that makes the plastic of the black lid of the computer.

 

And someday, if we’re lucky,

future humans will salvage the elements of this computer

out of recycling centers or landfills

to make those flying cars we were all promised

in the visions of the future —- just like the Jetsons!

Maybe. . .

 

Yesterday, I saw the sunlight pour into my living room

illuminating the trees within the couch frame

and the dinosaurs and sheep

in the nylon and wool upholstery.

 

Then I thought of the air I breathe,

how the very molecules now circulating in me

might have circulated in the breath of those dear dinosaurs

now in the computer and the cushions.

Atoms that I breathe in may have been breathed in

by Jesus, by the Buddha,

by Jack the Ripper, by Genghis Khan. . . .

 

No, I don’t live in a cosmic blender

But in a cosmic dance

creating, destroying,

coming together, falling apart.

Recombining in new forms

that so easily hide

the dinosaur in my living room

and the sunshine in my heart.

— Cat Charissage, (c) 2019, a.r.r.