Transparence

Susan Ioannou
First appeared in [Word]: A Journal of Canadian Poetry, Spaniard's Bay, Newfoundland: Undertow Press, 2010.

On sunlit grass—a flash
plumps into a tiny palmful
whirring feathers—the brightness
a hummingbird.

So is our human body too
in this great swirling
cosmic soup of gluons and quarks
formed from a quirk of light?

And in 4 billion more Earth years
will our fraction of an instant
never again repeat as us
—just so?

Or is our conscious spark enduring
into some distant eon's moment
within an ozone molecule
or silver boiling a bubble through stone?

What if, in a little spider
scurrying over its glistening web,
a million years into the future
I have glimpsed myself?

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Susan Ioannou's works copyright © to the author.