I Sing To Eternity

To an unmet friend: You see the mortal world and for you man is machine, little more than a device for the vagaries of evolution. Faith is illusion, hope lacks weight-- and love? Can love be other than mere sex, nature's sole mandate? And your science now tells you: what can I ever know? All is quantum topsy-turvy, mother nature being part whore, part illusionist.... Your thinking breaks all down to little pieces, and nothing matters as matter is all while science the only god left for us to worship. And we are nothing, not even dreams anymore, just bits and pieces to be examined, classified, and then ignored-- for science is all, and faith but a refuge for fools. You are honest, I know-- you see yourself as just another machine, destined for decay. then destruction-- your sentience but a cruel joke told yet again-- and no one laughs. You and I, we breathe, we think, we live, but you would stop at death while I begin there.... I sing to the Eternal: quell not my songs as they rise above the sad despair born of your vacant world and follow myriad stars streaming their wondrous light in the vast dead-cold Universe.... I sing to Eternity, I sing to my Soul. [poet's note: I put this as the 1st poem in my 1st book, 'The Enormity of Existence' because I think of this poem as coming out of something I experienced in 1971 as a 24 year old when I almost drowned in the Winooski River in Vermont. I was like that 'unmet friend' before I went into that river: certain of my nihilism, believing only matter was real--no God, no soul, no meaning to life. For 1/2 a century I've had more questions than answers, but I do know that what we perceive as 'reality'--with our limited senses and limited intellects-- is not 'Reality'....]