The Greatest Grandeur

Some say it's in the reptilian dance

of the purple-tongued sand goanna,

for there the magnificent translation

of tenacity into bone and grace occurs.

And some declare it to be
an expansive desert
solid rust-orange rock like dusk
captured on earth in stone
simply for the perfect contrast
it provides to the blue-grey ridge
of rain in the distant hills.

Some claim the harmonics of shifting
electron rings to be most rare and some
the complex motion of seven sandpipers
bisecting the arcs and pitches of come
and retreat over the mounting hayfield.

Others, for grandeur,
choose the terror of lightning peals
on prairies or the tall collapsing cathedrals
of stormy seas, because there they feel
dwarfed and appropriately helpless;
others select the serenity of that
ceiling/cellar of stars they see
at night on placid lakes,
because there they feel assured
and universally magnanimous.

But it is the dark emptiness
contained in every next moment
that seems to me the most
singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing
burning cedar knots or
with parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and stepping
sideways, with tumbling white-faced
mimes or companies of
black-robed choristers;
to fill simply with hammered
silver teapots or kiln-dried crockery,
tangerine and almond custards,
polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks,
wailing walls; that space large enough
to hold all invented blasphemies and pieties,
10,000 definitions of god and more,
never fully filled,
never.

~ Pattiann Rogers ~
(Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems)