SCOPES

Looking outward a spinning cosmos stuns
The sense, thousands of trillions of nuclear
Explosions pepper the nightly spectacular!
So much for childhood’s twinkling benisons.

The radioactive torrents cascade through time
And space in magn1tudes beyond conceiving,
Emptiness and vastness interweaving.
So let’s look inward. The vistas are still sublime,

Fifty trillion cells per human body,
Miles of tubules, billions of corpuscles
Hundreds of processes, pageants of miracles–
The mode o£ comprehension is rhapsodic.

Poised between telescope and microscope
A mere existence is grounds for faith and hope!

(59, October 13, 1992)

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