Interleaved

Where the shapes
Of land and sea
Lay down their arguments,
Moving boundaries
Throw stones in the deep,
Hollow caves into the earth.

Beneath rock and water
Patterns of patterns
Form the world’s words,
The manner of their speaking,
Echoes of seismic change.

Still we stand
On the prominent place
Or down where the ground is broken,
And we are known by our numbers,
Creatures of complex kind
Layered with codes and silences,
All our hard-cut facets
Secrets and exceptions
Intertwined.
Underneath the clothes we wear,
Our splendour glistens.

But the world
Is a place of iterations,
Small variations repeating
The mathematics of forever.

Small fish swim in the tides below us
Crabs cross shards of sand
Between boulders
Where the cliffs lie dead.

Insects crawl from tiny carrion
On the beachheads and ledges
And above, where the grass runs green,

Into the longer distances of solid ground.

Oceans keep geology silent,
And mountains, the clouds.
Between them, rain comes on the wind,
Fragments of sea, falling,
For the wind to dry away again.
Fragments of sea, soaking the ground,
To make rivers find the way home.

Only we, with our suppositions,
Write down the unwritable
As if, captive, we could reinvent it
In an imagined place.

This is how we keep,
In our literate, numerate hearts,
All the long-chain mysteries of the earth
Encrypted by our wisdom.

Meanwhile the soil
In crumbs under our feet
Goes on living around us.
The edges of the world rub
In innocent silence

Against each other.

The shapes of land and sea
Align beyond our eyes.
The arguments of stone
Grind on.
Water
Makes them clean.

© BH 2012

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Small is beautiful. If only because everything large is made up of small things: built of bits. The beauty of our bigness is a reflection of the beauty of our smallness, refracted by the way we grow.

That's it. Perhaps, too often, what is big is grown in haste and forgets the bits it's made from. Ugliness springs from this denial. Bigness without respect is anathema.

Number 9 in the Initialising sequence.