And the world was not round she came to find,
not of smooth surface and brightness in the darkness
like the Apollo missions suggested with photographs
of a brilliant bulb casting blue rays into the starry black sea;
no, it was lumpy, craggy, unclean, and violent –
Oh the violence! Soundless plants hunting, quiet
fish battling, men and women and young and old
swinging fists and slinging cruel words with panicked abandon;
the world was not confident, but insecure
in its lonely existence of consciousness, it was not orderly
as the spherical portal of her childhood Smithsonian, not
lovely, not full of endless beauty, not a world for kindness.
How much it pained her, day by day, to watch the slipping
of the equinoxes, the teetering of the souls wild
with fear and desire; her heart grappled with the daring ways
her planet had put itself together, she questioned
if nothing would have indeed been better… But the clacking
of the keyboard, and the howl of the winds battering
her fifth story apartment, and Joni Mitchell crooning, and the
dogs that bark in the wan morning, the world was very much
a savage place, and what a wonder, what astronomical odds
that she would be a part of such strange savagery;
it moved her towards believing as a foot instinctively seeks
the next rung on a ladder whilst climbing up.