Toy of the Gods

Image borrowed from Bing


Toy of the Gods

1.
Nature is mandated
to procreate, gestate, and burst forth
a beautiful birthing of rainbow blossoms
every Spring, an entire planetarium
of fecundity and renewal whereby
Winter rolls over and backslides
as the song of bees and bird-ballads
replaces the deep silence,
and from space, midst the aching darkness
of non-atmosphere, if one could turn
the Hubble’s magnificent lenses toward
the earth, the ultra deep field images
would appear kaleidoscopic
as the world whirls its land masses
to face the sun, just a blue-green humungous
organism reaching for warmth
and the light.

2.
Galileo did not invent the telescope,
Leonard Digges did, but he did improve it
enough so that the stark clarity of images
frightened superstitious clerics, and Galilei
had to face the Inquistion
and then spend his precious final days
under house arrest.

3.
Three hundred years later in Scotland,
David Brewster invented the kaleidoscope,
putting Spring 1814 in a bottle, creating
reflective and rotational symmetry,
setting three mirrors at 45 degree angles
that were capable of showing us
eight overlapping duplicate images,

4.
allowing this magical circle of mirrors
to reflect loose colorful beads, pebbles,
or bits of glass, sometimes even thick liquids
in the object chamber as we let loving light
enter the opposite end twirling the chamber
like a Carroll pepper grinder, marveling
at the psychedelic patterns emerging,
never two sets the same,
like captured snowflakes drenched
in the brightest of hues, swirling
noise-fully, joyfully like a handful
of crushed stained glass window shards.

Glenn Buttkus

April 2011

Listed as #30 over on Magpie Tales 63

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