Surprise is building on surprise here. Hair is awe-inspiring. Why should anyone have it? Or why should it be hair on people, and grass on lawns, and not the other way around? There's more mystery in a single blade of grass than in all the unsolved mysteries of history. Or rather not more mystery, because mystery, wonder, simply grows, expands on itself, defies our poor tongues and imaginations.
If we are not struck blind and dumb with wonder at every turn, then we were surely blind to begin with. Try to describe water, liquid in general, describe it for a people whose planet is devoid of liquid. It's so dazzlingly incomprehensible, untouchable, indefinable, the minute you step out of the rigid lines of your dull scientific vocabulary, you'll be utterly lost in stammering bewilderment. And that, only for water. You've not even begun to describe the world. Could you have imagined motion, or light, or music, had it never existed? A child- simple and intensely curious- knows more of the world than we do, and even at his most childlike, a child hasn't begun to know, because a lifetime is insufficient even for the exploration of one backyard.
'There is no freedom' years to me have whispered
We living, dying, choose from slavery
And slavery- our masked and silent masters
Stalk silent; still some soul-thirst drives us, goads us
To shriek out 'Freedom, freedom!' This eludes us,
To leave us begging, 'Freedom, or I die'
Yet no man wholly man is wholly free.
Chain merchants cry to me 'Throw off your chains!
Bind yourself now with cords of liberty!
Exchange a cell for dungeon and go free
My heart cruelly tied and struggling, frantic strains
Against a massive weight of Universe
Harsh voices in the mist and darkness shout
'This way lies soaring flight- beneath these stones!
Within these wings of lead- my mind is fire
And searing pain, in keenness of desire-
Somewhere shine stars- uninterrupted sky
There is a word, a world, where spring winds tear
In unfettered gladness through a swaying field
Into horizons constantly receding
Where orchards burst in furious shouts of white
Defiant blossoms shuddering into pink
Great whorls of life and sound and fragile freshness.
This gladly singing world still unexplored
And dazzling in its details- who can say
Why beauty heaps on beauty in this way?
And tiny veins race laughing through the leaves
To catch the glorious sun- the glow is swelling
Across reflecting waters- color, breath-
Full-charged with music- every bud is triumph
Each branch is clarion- ripples, wonder-
Feathers, grave miracles, and on a duck,
A million miraculous plumes
Make glossy neatness. Rumpled bark of trees.
My head is struck, and eyes half-blind with magic.
Small birds are flitting- who can say what holds them?
Nets of fine-spun silver strung from cloudbanks
They swing suspended, breath to breathless moment
Floating unfalling, graceful; every second
Atoms swirl in seeming-solid objects
Millions dancing in the page I write on
And vault in pert abandon through my ink.
The hidden laws of gravity continue-
Or seem to do so- when we speak of laws-
('The universe is ruled by this and that'
Scientists say with all the satisfaction
Rule-memorizers feel when spouting rules)-
I want to cry in fear- in joy and awe-
There is no law- this force which holds us living
Which shaped us from the shapeless, oscillating
And holds us shaped- poised on disintegration.
This turgor pressure of the universe
Grand, wild, creator God- this King of Romance
Lord of astonishment, I breathe and feel
Each breath as a surprise.
In all my desperate, night-weeping soul-pain
Doubt, existential days, wanderings in blackness
And suffocating fear- the empty hours
Stone blind and brain-sick, exhausting stubbornness
In radiant melody Your strange world calls me.
Where beauty is as great as mystery.
The sunset lights the lake in reddish gold.
I touch this tree.
Song-struck and struggling in surmise, delight...
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