Who Would Be A God?

Susan Ioannou
First appeared in Ygdrasil, December 2003,
Reprinted from Who Would Be a God? A Debate in Poetry(with Lenny Everson). Kitchener: Passion Among the Cacti Press, 2004.

"Oh, I would be a god"
—Lenny Everson

Who would be a God?—Such juggling!
Scheduling rivers to run backwards
or a crack to lengthen and widen
boiling up black smokers beneath the sea.
And what to do about Popo Chang's petunias
soccer-balled by red-necked boys,
or Antarctica melting,
while ants wobble a giant breadcrumb
toward their hungry mountain of sand?
The bluest skies have ignited with suicide drones.
Within the next sixty seconds,
how many thousand more
babies—which genes? what gender?—should be conceived?
Churches, synagogues, mosques, gutters, or temples,
the centuries' dizzying Babel deafens.

Infinities of invisible sprockets!
From orbits to neutrons, keep all spinning
across string theory's ten dimensions.
What of that fat firecracker, chaos?
Forever its sizzle is so tempting
to shatter every well-oiled cam and pinion
in any present and possible universe.

Isn't mere mortal fussing enough of a headache
—to dig from clean laundry two navy socks that match
and remember not to sprinkle the cactus
except every fifteenth day,
let alone halt wars, seed famines,
and recharge a global economy?
Each body is, after all, a whole cosmos
revolving joints in their sockets,
dodging those rogue asteroids
cancer, Parkinson's, pneumonia,
not to mention woofing and warping
around space-time's white hole,
the soul.

Too much!
God only knows.

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Susan Ioannou's works copyright © to the author.