Louisville Process Theology Network

Illumination of Matter and Thought

To the Lightning

 

Now I can believe

that you never left

that always you

were there outside time

thinking in the dark

a moment of the world

waking it

to its only instant

changing it

even before it knew

 

ancestor

 

whom your children

have never remembered

not one of them

and whose illumination

they could not hope to survive

 

beginning

 

around us all that time

unchanged as we travelled

from whom our eyes descended

and the things we say

whenever we see you

 

there is a question

we do not dare to remember

and you disappear

before there are words for it

is that from you too

 

W.S. Merwin