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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