POETRY: A Magazine of Verse
Diverse philosophies to tear the world.
You knew, when the green cell arose, that even
The You which formed it, moving on, would bring
Races and breeds, madmen, tyrants, slaves,
The idiot child, the murderer, the insane—
All springing from the action of one law.
You knew the enmity that lies between
The lives of micro-beings and our own. You knew
How man would rise to vision of himself,
Immortal only in the race's life;
And past the atom and the first glint of life,
Saw him with soul enraptured, yet o'ershadowed
Amid self-consciousness!
A Voice:
I knew.
But this your fault: you see Me as apart,
Over, removed, at enmity with you.
You are in Me, and of Me, even at one
With Me. But there's your soul—your soul may be
The germinal cell of vaster evolution!
Why try to tell you? If I gave a cell
Voice to inquire, and it should ask you this:
"After me what—a stalk, a flower, life
That swims or crawls?" And if I gave to you
Wisdom to say: "You shall become a reed
By the water's edge"—how could the cell foresee
What the reed is, bending beneath the wind
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