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.

Catching Waves

“The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder, but when I think of the fine known gradations, my reason tells me I ought to conquer the cold shudder.”
Charles Darwin

Stand anywhere.
Take a slice thinner than a human hair
Are there pictures passing through the air?

To catch light on a film of silver salts;
boil animal hides to gelatine,
spread a thousandth thick on celluloid,
turn black to white from red blue green,
from white to black and back again.
Stand anywhere. Catch the light
as pictures passing through the air.

Or to catch a wave - electromagnetic
and visible to the eye - align an array
of ten million solar cells,
turn red blue green into something or nothing;
(binary bits and bytes per pixel),
colours to numbers and back again.
Caught on the end of a human hair,
are there pictures passing through the air?

Or conquer a cold shudder and
take advantage of a long line
of slight successive variations
advanced by the shortest and slowest steps
in numerous gradations towards an organ
of extreme perfection and complication.
Did nature once make a nerve sensitive to light?

Stand anywhere.
Take one hundred and sixty million spliced human hairs;
are there pictures passing through the air?

*The majority of the final verse is an arrangement of Darwin’s own words in The Origin of Species and from a letter to a colleague