When I Heard the Learn'd Cosmologist

(after Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer)

When I heard the learn’d cosmologist, 

when animations flickered in windows before me, 

when shown the shape and scale of space unspooled by time, 

when images rendered by silicon circuits from a distant gold-plated lens 

sated my screen – how soon my soul burst, unbound, 

till rising I took to the crisp night-air, 

and gripped by a vision, peered through the darkness 

between the stars and saw the dawn of time. 

Pillars of Creation, IR image by NASA,  ESA/Hubble team

Dominion

At the dawn of dominion a dark-eyed youth
slips from her hovel through mud and dung
out to a pasture of silence and stars.

Driven by visions she’s cursed to proclaim, 
she enters the city set on the hill 
and cries out to the uncaring crowd – 

Dominion is a stone facade 
with cedar beams and paneled walls;
it’s frescos lining marbled halls. 

Dominion is a court of laws 
with ornate scrolls of holy codes 
and tablets carved with harsh decrees. 

Dominion is the gift of grain 
backed by chains; dominion 
is the sweat of slaves. 

Dominion is a fortress, walled, 
its storeroom, bare, its cistern, dry; 
dominion stares with hollow eyes. 

Dominion is a city, breached, 
the stench of streets 
pooled with sewage, guts, and blood 

and pierced by shrieks of wounded youth. 
It’s the wail of old women 
and the silence of a starving child 

scavenging the ruins of rude huts. 
Dominion is a broken plow 
by a field sewn with corpses. 

Painting by Jean Mielot, canon of Lille, 1455. 

Image and description are from "Jerusalem" 

by Michel Join-Lambert. Elek Books, 1958