Intelligent Design
Posted by Sruthi Sadhujan (Alumnus) | Filed under '07 Spring: Alchemy, Poetry, Print, Show Poems
One night, God had a dream.
In his dream he created a man.
Soon after, he created the sun,
And Man, just days old, with a sigh that could not be distinguished from a scream,
almost died from the beauty (that shattered his eyes,)
And one day man saw himself reflected in a pool of water,
And in his eyes, he saw astronomy,
he saw whole universes and cosmos tumbling and wheeling over each other
Every fleck of his iris became Cassiopeia and Orion,
and the stark glare of mars was chained into submission.
And as the stars thawed in his eyes and overhead,
Man cried, he inundated his ego,
Thinking that maybe he was the universe in compact.
And so he took the first bite of his apple of doom,
From the apple of his eyes, he ate fully
and from the grail of his tears, he drank deeply, replenished,
He wiped the corners of his mouth, and made himself into a deity.
Man flirted with gravitational pull and grew seraphic wings out of wax,
Waxed his vanity and left it in the trophy case,
As he flew off and attempted to play tag with the sun.
Man sat on Olympus with cheeks swollen from his Herculean ego,
when oxygen deficiency started to take over him,
And he thought to himself,
like Michelangelo had touched the divine on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel,
Maybe he too could dream beings into existence.
And so each night he slept, and each night he dreamt.
He began with a pulsing red heart,
Swimming in bright blood, pulsating like the mouth of a landed fish
Two lungs, blooming with vitality from the chest,
A mysterious liver, a hermetic pancreas,
And a constellation of arteries and veins, a universe contained in the space of a body,
All feeding the sanguine, fetal heart that was gaping like a pathetic newborn for breast milk.
Each organ spoon-fed the other, inseparable like Siamese,
Suffered claustrophobic love and separation anxiety from each other,
and a being, panting from the labor pains of simply being dreamt into existence, was born.
Drained from his efforts, man felt hollow on the side
Feeling like when had first waited for Eve in what seemed an eternity,
When God had hollowed part of him on the inside,
in taking out a rib to make him a companion.
That same feeling of emptiness took hold of him now,
As the universe around him turned in on itself,
His newly created being was blown into a million pieces of dust,
While his own fingertips were carried away on the wind,
until he could no longer touch Eve,
Who suddenly flew up in a smoke, and descended as one rib at his feet.
He stood on the barren land, sifting sand through his fingers,
Remember his origins with sudden pain
And though he sobbed at losing his companion
And though he sobbed at finally understanding the smallness of his own being,
Not even the stars had pity on him and put themselves out one by one,
Because dawn was breaking,
And God was waking from his long night of dreaming a man into existence,
And man was stretched into inexistence by the very eyelids of God,
He was hollowed by God’s waking, by more than just a rib,
But by organs and blood and entire constellations
Because for a moment, he had forgotten how to separate precipitate from solution,
arrogance from devotion.
He had forgotten how to separate divinity from humanity,
And for a moment, he had thought his footprints could to shake the ground,
uproot the Nile,
turn the world upside down,
and throttle the earth from its from its axis.
But it was all a dream, and God woke up, he had better things to do than let foolish beings run away with celestial fantasies.
