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Veteran's Day weekend. On Friday, we went to see Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers, putting me back in touch with my own father who returned from the war with scars he never talked about, chronic disabling hives from whatever went on in Burma, incipient alcoholism, and a fragile wife whose young baby, my older brother, died from spinal bifida while he was away.
I, the second child, the first post war, am a product of what remained of that marriage for the next three decades as I watched my parents struggle with the demons left by the American crusade against facism in Europe and Japan.
Most of this week's poems developed over my reading of The Varieties of Scientific Experience by the late Carl Sagan. Blame Carl, if you wish. He won't mind. <g>
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gray matters
So Don't Stop
I cannot operate
With one set of assumptions
For science and logic
And another set
For the Sabboth and election day.
God and the universe
Cannot be separated
By political opportunism
Or blind religious zeal.
If God exists,
He is all around us
Manifested in mathematics
And physics, large and small;
The search for truth is sacred
And should not be limited
By any one limitation
Of space and time.
We are born with the desire to find out,
Belief is not enough without knowledge.
God's mind is spread across the stars
In both nebulae and forest ponds.
If we limit revelation to this single planet
Among the billions he created,
We limit God, making him no more
Than the deity of some minor, local tribe
In an obscure arm of a single galaxy
Among the infinite.
If we are to find God, we must go out there
Among the stars and planets of a plentiful universe,
Where we might find God incarnate
Taking deep breaths of methane
As he teaches the good news to his people.
Only the search is sacred:
To refuse the search is to refuse God
And damn us all to oblivion.
Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006
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The Earth asks
That we all be careful out there.
- LJT
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the physics of the universe
Nothing
The universe is mainly made of nothing,
Something is the exception,
Darkness is commonplace,
Light, a rarity.
That we are something
Would be beyond belief
But that without our existence,
Why should we care?
We are here
Or we are not,
There is no inbetween;
No alternative
That would give us reason
To think about our absence.
Since we are here,
We should see who else
Who may have wandered
Into this star-filled nursery.
To be alone
Would seem such a waste
Of all the other stars and planets.
No god would be so profligate
As to leave all this matter unfulfilled.
Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006
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matter of fact
In Time
In 5,000 million years,
Give or take,
The sun will be a red giant
And we inside it:
The theological implications
Are staggering.
Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006
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ounting stars
Crunching Numbers
There are more galaxies in the universe
Than stars in the Milky Way;
For our planet to be the only one with life
Is unlikely
Unless the god in question
Has a short attention span
And has forgotten about all else
But earth and mankind.
Do the math.
Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006
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Nova
1572
Cassiopeia changed the heavens,
Exploding Aristotle's perfection;
A bright, untidy light,
The last gasp of a dying sun,
Removed the stars from God's dominion
And the earth
From the center of the universe.
Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006
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if this goes on ...
A Different View
We breath the waste products of plants,
They ours;
Extinction is the normal state,
Survival the exception;
More species are extinct
Than are alive on the earth today.
Some day, we will be gone,
An evolutionary dead-end
Or surpased by some other being
More suited to the times,
Either way, the universe will continue,
Even as we try to delay our passing.
Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006
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If we are ignorant of what the issues are
And can't even ask the critical questions,
Then we're not going to make much of a difference.
If we can understand the issues,
If we can pose the right questions,
If we can point out the contradictions,
Then we can make some progress.
-- Carl Sagan
1934-1996
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carl's legacy
Looking Back
Looking at the earth from space,
There are no national boundaries,
No Equator,
No Tropic of Cancer or Capricorn,
No East, no West,
No North or South.
Black, white, rich and poor
Are passing inventions,
Democrat and Republican,
Socialist and capitalist,
Are illusions drawn
By greed and cunning.
We breathe the air
Al-Qa'ida breathes,
As do the Rwandans, Thais,
Columbians and Chinese.
We breathe the same air
That Caesar did,
That caressed Jesus
As he hung dying on a cross.
Only the planet is real
And the life upon it;
And then we'll be gone
And the planet will go on
For as long as the sun shall live.
Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006
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explication on an ancient discourse
Essay on the Gods
About the gods I have no means of knowing
either that they exists or that they do not
Or what they are to look at. Many things
prevent my knowing. Among others, the
fact that they are never seen.
-- Protagoras, 5th Century B.C.E.
God is all knowing,
God is all powerful,
God is good,
But evil exists.
God observes all actions,
Intervenes in the ways of nature,
God loves both compassion and justice:
Pain and death are not illusionary.
A body in motion tends to stay in motion,
Thou shalt not travel faster than light,
The universe moves towards ultimate disorder,
There is no privileged frame of reference.
Worlds without gods, gods without worlds,
Gods that were made by pre-existing gods,
Gods always there, gods that don’t die,
Gods that do and some more than once.
Prophets, saviors, resurrected gods and heroes,
Offerings, incarnations, ascetic expectations,
Sacrifices, rituals, and temple prostitutions,
Jihads, inquisitions, and promised afterlife rewards.
Know God by what he chooses to do
And by what he does not do;
The intervention of God in human affairs
Is a sign of divine incompetence.
He should have got it right the first time
When he set the whole thing up.
Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006
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The hushed look of onlookers
Unsure if their post-mod handbook
Is being read or not.
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shifting the center
God’s Image
There was a time when angels walked the Earth.
Now they cannot even be found in Heaven.
-- Yiddish proverb
Does God have nostrils,
If so, what does he breathe?
Air? Oxygen?
Or a mixture of Methane
And some organic gunk?
What holds the atmosphere
He inhales into his lungs?
Earth? Saturn?
Or some planet
Circling some close by star?
Does he have hair?
If so, where?
Does he use ten toes, ten fingers
To keep track of higher numbers,
Does he have four strong limbs
From when he climbed on trees
To help him move about?
Does his appendix have some meaning
Or is his likewise good for nothing?
Is his skin brown or white or dark as night?
Or perhaps he’s green,
Like the other inhabitants
Of some distant Kermit infested planet.
’Though obviously he must have
A good working knowledge
Of quantum mechanics,
And Newtonian gravity,
And the inner workings of atoms,
A college professor’s image
Or a wheel chair theorist’s
Is not something you’d expect
From The Almighty:
So perhaps he is in need of a makeover.
It’s worth a try.
Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006
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