Atheist (a Psalm)
Ode to the Higgs-Boson Discovery, maybe
Did we hear your breath in a statistic,
A voice within a magnetic pulse
A faint arrhythmia split from an electron’s decay,
From the exhaled particles of an iron lung,
That wheezing calliope
Puffing out carnival tunes for the higher minds?
Faithless, I have my doubts —
For the somnambulists and the glory-seekers,
Those restless throngs milling in the fields
Poking stamen with Mendelian glee
That forcing words from TeV signals
Or syllables from mere postulation
Or Greek letters from calculations
May bring us nearer your light.
If you had anything more to say since Eden,
In that dewy etched window grease
Smeared with ghostly prints and dried skeletons,
Spiders caught in their own web,
Or in the full moon nightlight at daybreak,
Or the red rise of Damascus mourn,
We have not been listening to your song.
Me, I’ll wait for you by the elm,
when the wind catches the leaves just right
And doubt you still.
~ Rob K. Omura
Rob K. Omura lives in Calgary, Alberta, where he lives from oil plumes, surrounded by vistas and all the trappings of modern living. He prefers to spend his days hopping mountain ridges in the Rockies, where there is nothing else to consider by the next step and the majestic views, and sometimes he even dabs the wet ink and ties words on to lines. His fiction and poetry appears or is forthcoming in numerous literary journals, ezines, and anthologies including the New York Quarterly. His poetry aired on CBC Radio for National Poetry Month in April, 2008. He was a 2009 Pushcart nominee. Sometimes he works on his novel, and at other times, he drinks coffee, sighs and wonders when he’ll get back to work on his novel.
“Writing poems is like carving stone; although you often see what the stone wants to be, it takes a sharp chisel and a little blood and sweat to bring it forth. You don’t create the stone; you merely give it the shape it wants to be.â€
Read more of Rob K. Omura’s poetry here:
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