| Starpoet Newsletter Vol. VII, No. XLVI |
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| News - Newsletters | |
| Written by Lisa Jain Thompson | |
| Sunday, 12 November 2006 | |
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The
Starpoet
Newsletter
Vol. VII, No. XLVI
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ <><><><><> Veterans from the War
Behold a pale horse:
And his name that sat on him was Death, And hell followed with him. The second great war
Stole our fathers from us all, The men who returned From Europe and Japan Were not the ones who left. Our fathers carried their memories
To their graves, Seldom speaking of their wounds, Holding their scars Tightly bound in their silence. We grew up not knowing
The men who were left behind, The ones still lost in Burma When the generals thanked them For their efforts
And sent their bodies home. But we knew, the families knew,
The cost of war consumes Far more than money, limbs, and body:
What they saw, What they did to survive,
Haunted them
And colored them All the rest of our lives Long after the generals’ guns grew cold. I miss the father I never really knew,
The young mother
Who sent her lover off to war
And could not recognize The person who returned, The childhood Disney promised
Instead of the bits and pieces Left by our participation in the war. Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006
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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 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ 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 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ 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 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ 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 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ 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 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ 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 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ The hushed look of onlookers
Unsure if their post-mod handbook Is being read or not. __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ 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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^^\/\/\/\/^^ time enough for love
Fiat Tempore
My kind didn’t really slither out of a tidal pool, did we?
God, I need to believe you created me: We are so small down here. -- Lillie Emery
No sound of tinkling crystal
Disturbed the passage
Of spacecraft passing
The orbit of Mars, Or Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and the rest; The geometric elegance Of Plato and Aristotle Offered no resistance
To the intellectual acuity
Of Von Braun and Sagan.
If your father, or mine,
Walked into the room,
Followed by his father
And his father’s father,
A constant line of ancestors
Back to our primate beginnings, A week would pass,
Day and night,
Before the distant grandfather Would appear four legged To greet us granddaughter.
Deep time is everything:
God does not command
Individual flowers to bloom; The God of the Gaps
Is less than omnipotent, Always scrambling To find some new dark hole
When light is shone on the last. The earth, for four billion years,
Perhaps, as many as five,
Has been; Mankind, in all its forms,
Upright and erect, For handful of millions; Sapiens, this noble beast
We dare call wise, For a hundred thousand at best.
The universe, this universe,
Is an ancient experiment That has been running
Three times five billion years
In billions of galaxies, Each with billions of their own
Planet Earths:
Deep time is everything.
God, if he exists,
And who am I to say,
Is a physicist,
An Einsteinian mathematician,
A Hawking theorist,
Who understood
The deep framework And let time loose to do its work.
I would not deny a god exists,
Nor could I affirm him: I would, however, not belittle him,
Or use his presence To explain current ignorance
Of all the varied clockwork pieces.
Knowledge should not drive any god To a barricade himself
In some dark, mountain top position,
That time can wash away. Lisa Jain Thompson
November 2006 __/\/\/\/\__
^^\/\/\/\/^^ In order to make an apple pie from scratch,
you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ Peace
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^^\/\/\/\/^^ Send your letters and postcards to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it © Lisa Jain Thompson 2006
Further distribution of this newsletter in its entirety is authorized. |
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