At the brim of the river still running high my legs
refuse to cross. "Perhaps another day?" Too old
to say, "Yes." Too young to say, "No."

A Blue Heron flaps past me, gliding downstream.
I don't know at what depth knowledge turns into
gnosis and data into sufficated dreams. Even in
a new epoch an anthropomorphic god's prayed
to; but that beast, slouching toward
Bethleham arrived at its destination
centuries ago. "What comes next is
too large and far-off for humankind.”

In this wilderness of bits and qubits humans talk
as if there's an app that can hear a bear "singing
along with the spirits" while tracking Gaia's scat
on two feet too few.

 

 

Blue Heron: "...it had been the Heron whom First Man had sent back into the flooding
underworld to rescue the forgotten witchcraft bundle and thus bring evil into the surface
world." T. Hillerman, People of Darkness. New York, 1980.
that beast: Earth's "ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges." W. Broecker, "Ice Cores: Cooling the Tropics." Nature 376, 20. July 1995.
What comes next: R.M. Rilke, From, "Duino Elegies."
qubits: quantum bits. Quantum computing's fundamental building blocks.
singing along: S. V. Beyer, Singing to the Plants. Albuquerque NM, 2009.