Whether we ascribe to Adam and Eve
created
on the 6th day before God took a break
or
some other creation story creating “us,” in other images,
even
to Darwin’s theory, from single cell swimming
to
crawling from the water onto land, from ape
to
man, adapting, evolving, moving up the food chain,
it
doesn’t matter, for regardless, we are here, all of us,
arms
and legs and heads with brains, fingers
and
toes, dexterity to grasp and lift, to make tools
and
fire as we move freely about, bi-pedal and mobile,
searching
for ourselves to sustain us and family, youth
born
to perpetuate us, and continue, advancing, resembling us
and
perhaps our maker, too, poised well above us, something
greater
for us to seek, to worship and adore, and never fully understand,
but
something there beyond ourselves and our flawed humanity,
some
unattainable perfection, some morality that we strive for,
and
fail, yet we devote our lives to finding it, absolving some original
sin
or achieving the pinnacle of our evolutionary selves, always reaching,
though
not alone, left to flounder and stumble and to die a cruel death,
but
striving with our own kind, seeking together, united by our humanity,
in
kindness, sympathy and mercy, unselfish courage and integrity and value,
self-aware
and wholehearted, rational and free to choose rightly,
one
body of humanity, holy, blessed, passionate: one body;
hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions,
fed
with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to
the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed
and
cooled by the same winter and summer; and
the questions asked,
If
you prick us, do we not bleed?
If
you tickle us, do we not laugh?
If
you poison us, do we not die?
yes, one body, one humanity, in search of
nothing more
than life’s ending and its final reward, a
resting place
with the universe of mankind, as one body, one
humanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment