Musings

When Mnemosyne and Zeus got it on,
they made daughters who played
along edges of streams. Muses.
Memory mixed with majesty.
From the clear water currents that bubble up
through layers of leaf mold, through rocks,
through muddy soil and sand, the girls
splashed art and science and a soul’s hunger
for a glimpse of god in its singular self.
Creation rises through the grime
of experience and the rot of time,
like groundwater for richness of soul.

But I wonder now: will the currents that drive
an AI world run electric, the strike of lightning
alone from a sky ungrounded in mud, fortify
an imitation soul? Will it live in its machine mind
ever impatient of contemplation, its pleasure
a conflagration that burns a forest down?

Today, my words outdate before they dry
upon the page. An eagle shrieks and dives
to talon a white perch in a Choptank creek.
It will shred this fish into bleeding ribbons
to feed its young in the wide nest I cannot see
high up in some loblolly pine. This cry is my cry,
as is the beauty of the lightning dive,
as is the bloody feeding of my gape-beaked longing.

-Kitty Yanson