Skip to main content

A Boy With a Stick

I have nothing but wonder
     and wonder
For the physicists and mechanics
     in Geneva
Or wherever it is they are
     grubbing about
To find the secrets of the Higgs boson
     the God-particle
Or whatever else is in
     that donut hole

My respect for how tangled
The coils in their brains must be
Even to imagine what they cannot see
     and never will
Given our lumbering clumsiness
On the scale of things

Is overrun only by
The boy in our backyard
Who is discovering
How things are
With a stick

The mesquite tree
Crafted his tool and
     by some subconscious
     subnuclear
     subsistence
Process

Dropped it to him
The day before he becomes three
So that he can test
The nature of reality

He has switched
     and swatted
Everything within reach
Including an imaginary beast
He calls a Higgs Bison
     without neglecting
The bird feeder

Pausing in his research
To observe a butterfly

Something in his almost
Three-year-old brain
Want to swat it too
But he drops his stick
To follow it flutter-by

My job
The job of critters
Older than god-hypotheses
Is to foster wonder

So I sabotage the
Swat-instinct
     with respect
For beauty on
     the day before
     he is three

Swat and sweat are beautiful
But not like a butterfly

It isn't destructive
     what he does
Although it does leave
     in its wake
A certain number of
Casualties

He is discovering
The nature of reality
     at three

I will repair that later
     I say to myself
Seeing the debris

I think I had
     once
Such a stick myself
Before someone
Made me put it down

What
     he wonders
Will happen if I whack
At the dead oranges
On the dead orange tree
And he whacks and
Then he knows

He will not have to learn
That again, but he will

His arm tired
He drops the stick
And heaves a handful of gravel
Over his shoulder to see
      where it lands
And it does

Next time it will probably
Be different he hypothesizes
     so he tries and
Wonders at the variables

There is almost nothing
A boy with a stick
Cannot learn


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more