Wednesday’s poetry rendering
Synapses and Ganglia
What demon incarnation is this
That strides back and forth
Over the world, steps across oceans,
Traverses mountains and continents,
Tempts man with gifts, fears, anger, and rage,
Persuades to lust and jealousy,
To theft and fraud and mendacity,
Who stands bestride the world
Crowned in cruelty and brutality?
But a brief electrical pulse,
One signal passed one synapse to another to another
Among millions, billions, trillions of blinks?
Whence comes the hero
Who braves the fire,
The empathic who cries
For all the lost children she never knew;
How now comes the piano player
To stage a symphony at the concert hall,
The painter in his wonderfully messy studio,
The poet on the hill as the sun rises?
But an accident of genetics?
From where wells up
Belly laughs at funny falls,
All the harmless folly,
Endless foolishness, ironies,
And more?
And too why
The quiet one in the poorest of robes,
The most worn of sandals
Who walks unhurried across the hot sand,
Who heals the sick, straightens
The curled limbs of the lame?
Who absolves with
His elegant preachments
Down across the centuries,
With promises becomed miracles?
But mere pulses
Between synapses
Down among the ganglia?
For more writing by Phil Cline,
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