SAGACITY

      What trait is most appropriate for age
      If not to gain the insight of a sage
      And in all deeds at last to realize
      The ways and means and ends of being wise?

      Sophistication is but sophistry,
      The shadow side of apt integrity
      And not the essence of what’s truly holy,
      Which is not high and mighty—simply lowly.

      With modest insight into what is good
      And the means to do so rightly understood,
      One who is wise will take the prudent course
      Foreseeing best how to avoid remorse
      And to accomplish what is good for all
      And thus, in humble lowliness, stand tall.

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NEW DEPTHS

for Edgar Mitchell

With one giant leap, we landed on the Moon
Breaking forth from our Earthbound cocoon,
Escaping from its motherly embrace
To risk adventures in the depths of space.

Astronauts and cosmonauts embarked
In capsules where they floated free and larked
About in the absence of all gravity,
The sweetest way of making history.

A few of them, so far away from ground
And gravity, gained something more profound,
A visionary cosmic consciousness
That typically just saints and sages bless—

     Which gives new meaning to “the Depths of Space,”
     Implying there’s a universal Grace.

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THE LIVING UNIVERSE, II

    In all the universe—or if there’s more,
    Throughout the multiverse—there must be life,
    Which is our strongest reason to explore
    The depths of space: the hope that minds are rife.

    It surely cannot be that only we
    On this one world have managed to emerge,
    Given the vastness of our galaxy,
    Could we traverse it to the farthest verge.

    In fact there’s credent reason to suppose
    That creatures from out there have traveled here,
    Perhaps the source from which our race arose,
    Or merely visitors loath to appear.

          What’s popular in science fiction now
          May prove sometime what science will avow.

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THE NOETIC ERA

for Edgar Mitchell

        Considering the wonder of it All,
        An astronaut returning from the Moon
        Broke through the barrier of a mental wall
        To an epiphany, a holy boon.

        A flash of Cosmic Consciousness illumed
        His normally left-brained mentality
        Altering all he’d previously assumed
        About the nature of reality.

        The kind of science taught to engineers
        Can send a blazing rocket into space,
        But there’s another knowing that endears
        One to the cosmos with its special grace.

             Noetic science was in that moment born,
             A kind to make our species less forlorn.

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MONOTONE

     There’s light, but there’s no color in the dawn:
     The trees are shades of grey, so is the lawn,
     As if the scene with charcoal had been drawn—
     A sickly sort of day, so pale and wan,
     A monotone inducing one to yawn,
     A transient state that shortly will be gone,
     As melancholy as a dying swan.

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THANK GOODNESS

   “Thank God” we say when we intend to praise
   The essence of all good personified
   As someone with the mercy to amaze
   And save us through his power to provide.

   In doing so, we merely elevate
   The memory of our parents’ providence
   Toward us, when we were young, to the estate
   Of godhead, their love and caring made immense.

   “Thank goodness,” then, is more appropriate,
   A quality we all should emulate,
   For goods and services that benefit
   The world are what make human beings great.

        The godliness of goodness becomes real
        When any hungry soul is fed a meal.

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EPIPHANY

     Since my one blush of cosmic consciousness
     When I was just eighteen, spontaneous
     And unprovoked, an ethereal caress
     That made the Universe seem like an Us,
     I’ve not felt such communion so intense,
     But only warm reminders of that trance,
     Just faded echoes in my lonesome soul,
     Not visionary sight, merely a glance.
     Yet even that serene epiphany
     Sufficed to alter something in my brain,
     One blissful opening to ecstasy
     Of which but these faint vestiges remain.
          Still, such a glimpse of what may lie beyond
          Suggests my soul is a reflecting pond.

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