Carbon is the building block of life;
nitrogen -the spice for making enzymes, proteins-
is the majority of our atmosphere but it's locked
in the air and only freed by lightning strikes
or bacteria on the roots of certain plants
that have the trick of freeing it
until a chemist found a way
to pry it from the atmosphere
to make fertilizers and explosives.
He worked the process more,
developed poison gas for war.
His wife committed suicide
at a dinner party tribute to its
first successful use in the trenches
and still he won the Nobel prize.
We too used the process to make
explosives, had so much left over
after the war that we made it into fertilizer,
grew a lot of corn and soybeans, dollars.
Built a world of oil and blood and fear,
desire, and television, and many babies.
And yet the moment when the sunset
sky goes orange and the wind becalms
and lovers’ kisses fill their souls,
time is poised forever, as it has always been
across it’s arrows, misunderstandings,
and constructions. Faith abides.
We live by those and all that flows from that...
God and molecules, knowledge and history,
salt and honey, words and yearning flesh,
songs. The movement of a finger
or an eyebrow. A thought that gets away
or finds it's way into a dance step,
a note sung high, a life, a perfect page
a smile spreading very very slowly,
Do you hear the salt and see the honey?
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