I was asked to read some poems last night.  A gathering was sponsored by the Mundelein Arts Council at Taste of Paris.  Musicians from the area and several writers were given opportunity to perform in public.  I found my imagination going back to the late bronze age.  Certainly members of the aristocracy and their household servants gathered in the great room to hear a traveling bard sing/play lines from scenes in Homers great epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.  Tears would have come to some who were present.  Scenes represented in the lyric lines were no less than the warp and weft of human life, universal, timeless.

I felt tears of sadness well up last night too.  I felt the presence of Janice Joplin when her tune Me and Bobby McGee was performed.  Tom Petty was present when one of his early tunes was performed.

For my part I did my best to do justice to several Wendell Berry poems.  Berry has a deep love for the fields, forests, and animals of his place in Henry County, Kentucky. Berry has been a ferocious defender of the integrity of Nature for his entire adult life.  His poems, essays, and stories have changed my life.  It was an honor to read his work.

I conclude with this poem from Wislawa Szymborska.  I like the poem a lot.

MICROCOSMOS

When they first started looking through microscopes
a cold fear blew and it is still blowing.
Life hitherto had been frantic enough
in all its shapes and dimensions.
Which is why it created small-scale creatures,
assorted tiny worms and flies,
but at least the naked human eye
could see them.

But then suddenly beneath the glass,
foreign to a fault
and so petite,
that what they occupy in space
can only be charitably be called a spot.

The glass doesn’t even touch them,
they double and triple unobstructed,
with room to spare, willy-nilly.

To say they’re many isn’t saying much.
The stronger the microscope
the more exactly, avidly they’re multiplied.

They don’t even have decent innards.
They don’t know gender, childhood, age.
They may not even know they are—or aren’t.
Still they decide our life and death.

Some freeze in momentary stasis,
although we don’t know what their moment is.
Since they’re so miniscule themselves,
their duration may be
pulverized accordingly.

A windborne speck of dust is a meteor
from deepest space,
a fingerprint is a far-flung labyrinth,
where they may gather
for their mute parades,
their blind iliads and Upanishads.

I’ve wanted to write about them for a long while,
but it’s a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.