THE LITTLE KNOWN FACT
Lightning gets you eventually.
And in the middle of the storm
when you raise your fist against the sky,
you'll learn in a flash the little known fact
that lightening surges up as well as down.
Lightning gets you eventually.
But sometimes Thor is the target,
and it's you who throw the angry hammer.
THE VALUE OF ISOMETRICS
Work is defined as force times distance.
Technically, if no distance moved then no work done
whatever the magnitude of force.
An eagle soaring in a wide circle
and someone stumbling back to where he first started
both add up to zero in a physicist's ledger.
Effort without distance is wasted energy.
Fists pounding blindly against a wall yield bloody fingers.
but no work, for the wall doesn't budge.
But consider a gymnast, of the body or of the mind,
methodically pushing against the intractable walls of his gym,
his outer weakness pushed aside
before his patiently gathered inner strength.
Distance traveled is not always measured in feet or meters.
DAILY RACE
The alarm clock is the starting gun.
Will you once more run that circular track.
To race or not to race,
that is each morning's question.
And who are you running against?
There's no one in this bed but you.
Are you your own competition?
In a race of two
the winner is the penultimate loser
and the loser the penultimate winner.
But in a race of one
there is only one ultimate choice
to forever crouch at the starting line
and let your impostor win
or to break free and lead the way
FUZZY LIGHT
A single ray through the almost shut bedroom door streaks along the ceiling.
An awakening sleeper can not trace the beam back to its source,
which is the brightness behind that nearly closed door.
Nor can he follow it forward for it peters out
in the ambient dark somewhere along the ceiling.
Wide-eyed pupils perceive only a lack of clarity
a smudginess of light and dark,
a singular ray, a promise of light that shines upon nothing,
a fading sliver bracketed between radiance and universal shadow,
a path of luminance meddling into a groggy man's world
and coming to no particular point.
DEFINING THE DIVINE
And the serpent that seduced Eve into knowledge,
put its scaly rattle into its mouth and wheeled smoothly along
while Eve's children choked on a recursion of words.
Open Webster's.
Look up question and find query.
To question query is an interrogation.
An inquiry into interrogation is a catechism.
The definition of catechism is ultimately answered by question.
Question to answer to question to answer, to question,
a semantic circle first drawn by Webster.
Now try defining God.
Deity, spirit, divinity, creator, supernatural being, supreme being,
the meanings all fall into one another and ultimately back to God.
To define God is to be a mad dog chasing its tail.
RABBIT
Ten feet to the right of my father's tombstone, the rabbit watches me.
Now it turns and quickly hops away.
I see its flashing feet go down the path.
A crow flies overhead, and even higher
shafts of light pierce the clouds,
Even the air joins in.
A gentle breeze rises from nowhere
shaking the oak leaves, a soft rustling,
almost a hum.
A heavenly choir, perhaps? My Father's voice, maybe?
No.
I am alone by my father's grave.
I am alone when I tell him I miss him.
He doesn't answer.
The rabbit is gone.
It was just a rabbit.
The breeze chills; I shiver.
I envy those who can see something beyond
fleeting rabbits and staid tombstones.
By Richard Fein