Brains and Guts: The Write, Right, Rite of Revolution
Brains and guts orbit the soul—
that polar star searing in the marrow of being.
I was born somewhere between Einstein’s neurons
Ginsburg beat poetry, the birth of rock and roll, revolution marches,
and the calloused hands of a carpenter,
where ink stains fight oil slicks,
where the soft susurrations of Plato
wrestle the raw shouts of Spartacus.
Do you think Socrates sipped hemlock
or drank the truth undiluted?
Do you think Plato ever turned back?
Do you think he stepped out of his cave,
saw the world for what it was,
and still believed in the Forms?
There—between the measured arc of a pendulum
and the reckless speed of a cavalry charge—
I learned that history does not bend for cowards.
Brains map the constellations—
Ptolemy charted them wrong,
Copernicus spun them right.
But it was Galileo’s guts—
trembling before the Inquisition—
yet, daring to crack the celestial code.
Brains split atoms in Los Alamos;
guts stood in Nevada’s desert
daring to swallow the mushroom cloud’s after/math.
Oppenheimer’s eyes ash-heavy with fission’s psalm.
“What good are your equations,” gasped Hiroshima child,
“when my shadow burns the pavement?”
Brains penned the Constitution;
guts bled on the beaches of Normandy
to defend its ink.
Brains solve for X;
guts push past the limits
of what should be solvable.
Tell me, who owns the world?
The philosopher or the soldier?
The mathematician or the martyr?
The lover or the destroyer?
Newton’s Principia might have moved planets,
but Harriet Tubman moved people—
barefoot, night-blind,
each breath wagered against a whip.
She had no formula for escape,
just guts.
Brains engineered the gavel,
sculpted by jurisprudence,
weighing scales so delicate
they tip with the weight of a sigh.
Yet in the courtroom, it’s often guts that testify—
Yet even as justice stands trial
James Meredith stepping foot into Ole Miss—
Thurgood Marshall splitting the marrow of Jim Crow
Rosa Parks gripping the seat
with fingers stiff as iron rails.
And somewhere
some legislator drafts another bill
to justify a knee on the neck of justice.
Brains code the algorithms
that sell you your own hungers—
but it takes guts to starve the machine.
Brains: Turing’s code /
Guts: Alan Turing’s apple, half-eaten by history
Brains: Hubble’s lens /
Guts: Mandela’s cell, a womb of nations.
Brains built Wall Street from Hamilton’s ledgers
guts made Rockefeller and Carnegie
drink from their own ambition
until their stomachs curdled with guilt—
philanthropy the only antacid.
Look at Van Gogh,
painting sunflowers from the static of his mind.
Look at Tesla,
dying alone,
his ideas orphaned by the same capitalists
who wired his dreams into their pockets.
Look at Frida Kahlo,
each brushstroke a suture of pain,
her body broken
but never her palette.
Watson and Crick had the brains
but Rosalind Franklin—she had the guts.
She stared down DNA with her X-ray eyes,
crystallizing the language of life.
Do you think the double helix screamed for her
when they called it a discovery of men?
This poem is a double helix—
one strand ink, one strand wound.
Look at Sylvia Plath,
spitting out sonnets like cyanide,
her typewriter a guillotine,
her mind a moon crater—
deep, uninhabitable, ringing with voices
that no physicist could measure.
Brains can write the diagnosis;
guts wear the disease.
justice wears a gavel carved from bone
but guts keep fighting
long after the credits rot.
I have seen men use equations
to justify war.
I have seen children hold PhDs in suffering.
I have watched logic fail to explain love,
yet I have watched love rewrite logic.
Brains mapped the human genome,
but tell me—
And what of us—
you, me, the nameless billions—
what are we but the sum
of what we dare to ponder
and what we dare to risk?
can Euclid quantify courage?
Can binary codify hope?
Brains and guts, an endless duet,
fighting for the right to the final silence.
Which one are you made of?
Which one will you answer to?
Are we the gray matter
that maps the stars,
or the red sinew
that leaps into the void?
Tell me,
what is the cost of clarity amongst shadows?
Brains invent the question;
guts endure the answer.
Do you dare to see? Dare to speak?
Dare to be crushed beneath the weight of their truths?
Brains chart the stars;
guts sail the storm…
Brains wrestle with the divine;
while guts are the divine, unflinching.
Copyright ©
Daniel Henry Rodgers
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