We watch, daily, as the mother robin sits on her nest

in the green folds of our ash tree.  She has no plans.

The shape of her attentions is the shape of her life.

There are no intrusions of what is right and what is wrong.

Is this the bliss preceeding the “fall,” wherein we stood

in the light of no intentions save that of moving

to the next step of motion, guided by the dust of stars

and not the rigor of our designing mind,

to build an edifice of reason?

The “rights and wrongs,” brambles growing in our midst,

created the colors of persuasion, leading to blood feuds

and the maps of human conquest of the soul

and of continents and of the mechanics of living.

Whence came this hydra complex of heads and hands

dealing in the commerce of love and death,

from the hut on a dusty plain, alone in winds and storm,

to the towers of great height, containing the flesh,

containing the designs that can be blown away

in a whisper, in a flash and thunder of another design

that is as cosmically valuable as a leaf or an equation?

The “rights and wrongs” are made into song,

and the chants, hostile and noisey, drift through

the forests and cities like an acrid smoke that smells like truth.

The scent of truth falls like rain, each drop convincing us

we are the ones, we are the fortunate, we are the plan,

we are the minds, we are the hope, we are even the resurrection,

we are the masters, we are the legion marching across

the plain of moral certitude, marching through the brambles,

marching through the swamps of uncertainty,

because there is, we think, the diamond core,

the secret message, the holy grail, the monstrous truth,

and while a cup of earth may hold a thousand species,

it is our species, captured by our invented wisdom,

who march ahead, with shields upraised, our weapons

at the ready, our certitudes strutting out like spikes

that are a million light years long.

And the robin sits, and the eggs hatch, and the sun shines,

and the day proceeds, and my dreams try hard

to take in the beauty of this madness,

and ignore the madness of its beauty.