Gravity

Satellite, The Moon falls and misses Earth indefinitely
as light is bent around The Sun by the weakest of all forces.

Substance to structure, each life exacts a pull.
Manufactory, a seed reads code guides,
sucks at its surroundings,
extracts material means
for the making of a living.

Each gestation marks the pace of change
as side by side blue whale and pygmy shrew
accrue the necessary means of being.
Sentience, emerging, demands a higher yield
and hominid evolves its encephalon.

Migration walks and falls from foot to foot,
to strip and burn and pass. From hand to mouth,
new mind pits brute thought against red nature:
bent, out-witting, by means of invention,
the natural force of selection.

Settlement presses the footprint deeper;
Blue stones moved as though to the moon
still count, sacred, around a mound,
while hive minds now split time at somewhere
near the speed at which sun shines.

Technical replication, though blind as bacteria,
dumb as parasites, mutual as mitochondria
expects a necessary tending. And needy as we must be
to please our master genes, can we in any way see that
we never were the end and are still only part of the means.

And so a sixth great extinction shifts a gear.
Human moods unleashed from lunar-heave,
weave past neap and spring; sweep meme and meme;
belief defeats hard survival. Ideas pent to progress,
push like ‘misnamed’ tidal waves

or funnel a rising bore against the river’s tow,
cut back steep banks that shore from overflow.