Poem for early November

Earthquakes

Not Kierkegaard’s earthquakes, metaphorical,

Nor Lisbon’s ingenious conceit of Catholic sin,

Nor Lima’s premonitions of the world’s spherical

Demise, spinning out of control, veins of tin

And silver colliding from one end of the globe to another;

Nor this year’s Italian tremblings, tremor after tremor,

Lamentations of disorder, seismograph

No internal eye could ever photograph,

Disingenuous monitoring of tectonic plates,

As though we teetered on rust encrusted skates

And gathered in the rubble-strewn squares and plazas, nuns

And invalids, firemen and visual journalists, while suns

Do cartwheels in the mountains and siren puns

Elucidate the crunching of the fault-lines

Into a poetry of fossil creatures without spines

Who now emerge from deep within the lava

Caverns and shake their tentacles—we have a

Situation on this planet from tsunamis in the north

To melting icecaps in the south.  To go forth

As though the spiritual world and the moral mind

Are as they were in Søren’s time, or with Voltaire’s kind

Of rational certainties is now patently absurd;

We flee the fissures, the fractures and the fatuous word.