The Voice

image borrowed from bing

The Voice

Everywhere
dark in the void,
layered like ice crystals,
natal-wet and fecund,
squirming like larva,
planets are born
and die;

their interstellar coupling
ripping at the fabric of the universe,
yet, it is no more
than scarlet wind snakes
racing over red dunes,
near yellow oceans,
under green skies;

merely
silent concentric rings rippling
the tepid surface of those tiny puddles
in God’s eye.

Mortals toil
with the incarnate salt of their sweat
stained white on the worn leather
of their harnesses, bone-weary
beneath the bilious burdens they built
with their own hands,

straining against the terrible tethers,
shuffling along with a frisky time step,
flickering feckless in a flurry, until
they gnaw clear through the restraints--
hollering for liberty, sometimes dying
to insure their futile freedom,

running flat out, fleeing the police,
fearing the army, distrusting the politicians,
sprinting into the depths of a dream forest
that they imagine they are seeing
for the first time,

when something mysterious stops them
dead in their tracks, their lungs on fire,
eyes and fists clenched, gulping
the hot dust that settles on their pinched shoulders,

something,

something beautiful,
a voice,
soft, sonorous, sopranoic, calming,
in some penetrating perfect pitch
saying:

listen to the poetry of the planets,
open your heart to alien tongues
singing the sumptuous song of the swarm,

as the specter of Happiness,
taller than the trees, a golden monolith,
vibrating with a spectacular rainbow in its mouth,
swelled higher until it created a bubble
big enough to hold city states,

and the lesson learned was elementary,
happiness has a voice,

listen,
there,
and there,

can you hear it?


Glenn Buttkus

April 2012

Posted as #21 over at dVerse Poets-Open Link Night 39

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