The beauty of nature is suspect. Oh yes, the splendor of flowers. Science is concerned to deprive us of illusions. Though why it is eager to do so is unclear. The battles among genes, traits that secure success, gains and losses. My God, what language these people speak In their white coats. Charles Darwin At least had pangs of conscience Making public a theory that was, as he said, devilish. And they? It was, after all, their idea: To segregate rats in separate cages. To separate humans, write off as a genetic loss Some of their own species and poison them. “The pride of the peacock is the glory of God,” Wrote William Blake. There was a time When disinterested beauty by its sheer superabundance Gratified our eyes. What have they left us? Only the accountancy of a capitalist enterprise.
The fortune that you seek is in another cookie, was my fortune. So I’ll be equally frank—the wisdom that you covet is in another poem. The life that you desire is in a different universe. The cookie you are craving is in another jar. The jar is buried somewhere in Tennessee. Don’t even think of searching for it. If you found that jar, everything would go kerflooey for a thousand miles around. It is the jar of your fate in an alternate reality. Don’t even think of living that life. Don’t even think of eating that cookie. Be a smart cookie—eat what’s on your plate, not in some jar in Tennessee. That’s my wisdom for today, though I know it’s not what you were looking for.
Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing, Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches, Mad with the joy of the Sabbath, Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun, Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes, A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry living wild on the Streets through generations of children.
Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning, Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh Of the wind in the pinewoods, At night give praise with starry silences.
Give praise with the skirling of seagulls And the rattle and flap of sails And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor. Give praise with the humpback whales, Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.
Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas, Give praise with hum of bees, Give praise with the little peepers who live near water. When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries We know that the winter is over.
Give praise with mockingbirds, day’s nightingales. Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle And glossy tulip trees On quiet side streets in southern towns.
Give praise with the rippling speech Of the eider-duck and her ducklings As they paddle their way downstream In the red-gold morning On Restiguche, their cold river, Salmon river, Wilderness river.
Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow. Far, far from the cities, Far even from the towns, With piercing innocence He sings in the spruce-tree tops, Always four notes And four notes only.
Give praise with water, With storms of rain and thunder And the small rains that sparkle as they dry, And the faint floating ocean roar That fills the seaside villages, And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains
And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood, And with the angels in that other country.
-Anne Porter
Restigouche River, New Brunswick, by Richard James Taylor
Gladsome Lights 