friday | october 8 | 2010

a quintessence of dust.

O Lord, what is man that Thou takest notice of him?

Or the son of man that Thou makest account of him?

Psalm 133:4

i've been told that the

rings of saturn are braided.

there are fish below the sea,

well beyond the reach of sunlight,

far beneath the depth a human can dive,

fish that glow florescent,

illuminating the darkness,

with their own brilliance.

science and her gentlemen callers

have discovered these things

though robotic eyes. hidden kingdoms

for millions (some say thousands, i can't

say which is right) of years had remained

far from the mind of any individual.

who's to say that God didn't

braid saturn's rings or make fish shine

just so they'd look good on film?

this world of his, we forget,

was created for his own pleasure:

the rings, the fish, the sun, the ant,

the millions/billions of galaxies

undiscovered or newly discovered.

all these things existed before

you, before i, before hubble even

conceived of never-ending universes

or glow-in-the-dark ichthyology.

yet all these things were spoken

into being by God's word, and it was

man alone that he fashioned from

the dirt of the earth by his own hand.

we, a quintessence of dust, are

the pinnacle of his work, the paragon of creation.

but it is the beauty of the sky, the fusion

of geographical strata, the budding

of flowers, the expanse

of space that holds our gaze

while our neighbor sits at our gate, dying

to be fed, praying

to be welcomed, longing

to be seen. we, look beyond, straining

to see the glory of God in the night sky,

forgetting all the while that

the Lord did not come to us as a heavenly body,

but that he came to us, earthly mortals,

disguised as one of us.