All the World Was Broken [blank verse version] 4th October - World Animal Day Light and more light: the first of days began. To soar on weightless wings of air, God made Fair barbary doves and cocksure ravens, And mighty condors wheeling through the sky. For broad grass prairies he made wild sheep there, And bison strong of shoulder, white-tailed deer. For forests too he fashioned eucalypts And firs still green with dark and purple cones. He measured out the oceans and decree

Atoms and Void There is no body without void – Epicurus I You’d have thought it endless, Lucretius— The laminar descent of atoms Falling through a void serene and mute, Each atom unhurried, alone, Descending at a constant pace, Unmoved by force, untouched by will, No dawn to break their quiet fall, No god to stir the silent dark. But then—a swerve, a subtle bend, Two atoms veer, incline, and meet, A fragile sign of nascent will, A fracture within fate’s per

The Turnings of the Fire And so the burning mass passed Through all its turnings: One half of fire became sea, One half of sea became earth, One half of earth became air, And one half of air – the finer part – Became the creator who did shape Those elements into a sphere. And the sphere hung suspended In a wide circuit Of stars and celestial bodies Split off from the primal fire, Now clustered Around the globe like a host of radiant gods, Casting their rays into the

All the World Was Broken: An Ecopoem On weightless air, the cocksure ravens flew. Wild sheep chewed grass; deer And bison chewed too. On a slanted hillside white mountain goats Enjoyed a lofty view. In forests, eucalypti, fresh-minted, grew. And fire-green firs with purple cones, Did too. For the silver-studded starfish there were oceans Wet with green and blue – And oceans for the whale and dolphin too. On blackest soil, the man called Adam grew His

Aither / R-O-R' Light realm of air, from which heaven came: Neither hot nor cold, neither wet nor dry. Quintessentially, it was either the pneuma divine Holding in place the classical celestial spheres… Or an unseen substance of science for the propagation And transmission of light and gravity. But now it is just a word used by chalky chemists Denoting R-O-R’ with C-O-C linkages.

Leibniz’s Soul What is amazing is not that my corpse was contracted and compressed into the earth’s dark matter (while my grave went unmarked and unremarked for some fifty years) but that my soul, of magnitude so tiny it was nothing more than a vibrating point, escaped its prison and went its own way. No longer confined, the vibrating point was free to enter into compounds with unseen bodies of atomic size and together they let so much light pass through that they were barely

Coldly satanic is the phantom moon whose hollow shell is the alien body of a god who hatched and died too early.