For decades now they’re always right, it seems. Rarely a
gaff
from the sweeping beam of that prophetic radar Eye. Wide
satellite brain scanning our world on the ceaseless News with
vibrant charts of flowing light — from Arctic Blue to Tropic
Green — beneath the queer effect of mimicked cloud or jungle
steam. Our own small region we’ve peered hard to find, fading
in
and out beneath the spell of their fixed smiles (whether
"harsh or calm"), graphs of days we’ve still to live spread
wide as flags beside their raised batons. Like clever Gods
we
serve and claim to love (praise for stripping terror
from our lives, but wish to flee) they’ve taken all the
mystery away. All we’d feared but sought to understand —
following those rhythmic prints of wooly herds through
sleet; in later cults, as one, praying for rain. That need
to
feel our earthly days within the cortex, flesh, and bone,
worshipping the living Sun (or Ra): mists of doubt,
stirred
in
the night, that made us anxious for new daylight
(not assured), but made us whole.
Dan Stryk
teaches world literature and creative writing at Virginia
Intermont College in Bristol, and has authored five collections
of poems and prose parables, including The Artist and
the Crow (Purdue University Press). His most recent poems
and prose pieces appear in such publications as North
American Review, Shenandoah, Ontario Review, Harvard
Review, New York Quarterly, and his work is
represented in the anthology Common Wealth: Contemporary
Poets of Virginia (UVA Press, 2003). He is the recipient of
an NEA Poetry Fellowship.