The Flesh Made Word

By William Brendan McPhillips

21st Century

We know how human breath is borne
Into our bodies to be shorn
Of oxygen within our lungs
And dances out in tone on tongues.

But where in molecule and cell
Is noise disposed to cast a spell
Of rhythm, meter, rhyme and sense,
Transubstantized experience?

Do processes that gave us Tao
Still offer options to us now
When we so often comprehend
All processes distinct in end?

Is there out there some wider view
Of who we are, of what we do?
Is there some native motive why
All verities indict our "I"?

Does language, in its hint of whole,
Detect and justify the toll
Of wasted breath and joy and pain
Translated into acid rain?

Is there still there beneath our night
Some remnant of a vagrant light
That turns our breathing into song,
To right, somehow, some ancient wrong?

Long long before the minnow swam
Against the flow, against the dam
That cut across the river bed,
All that we say was somehow said.

DayPoems Poem No. 2284
<a href="http://www.daypoems.net/poems/2284.html">The Flesh Made Word by William Brendan McPhillips</a>

The DayPoems Poetry Collection, www.daypoems.net
Timothy Bovee, editor

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