Nature, sprung improbably

‘In this one of all fields I know the best/ All day and night, hoarse and melodious, sounded/ a creeping corncrake, coloured like the ground,/ till the cats got him and gave the rough air rest….// -Summer now is diminished, is less by him./ Something that it could say cannot be spoken – As though the language of a subtle folk/ Had lost a word that had no synonym.’ Norman MacCaig, A Voice of Summer

‘To make the natural world safe for physics, Decartes pushed consciousness right out of it into a separate spiritual world, treating each soul or mind as a spiritual substance, made of a stuff alien to other earthly items... But it seems increasingly clear that one extreme view is not more workable than the other. Materialism and idealism are equally the products of dualism.’ Mary Midgley, Science and Poetry, Routeledge, 2003

Nature, sprung improbably

Nature, sprung improbably
from mystery of the Word,

stardust molecules - light
and water, will burst into

green stars on trees,
human hands, bats;

butterflies, flowers,
wings, flying fish.

But her deeper magic -
written at the beginning,

is maintained, still irreducible;
principle of stark complexity –

RNA the big magic, original
rabbit from a Universal hat -

bridging the holy code
with art and chemistry,

understanding of production;
conducting free range matter,

as only our own mysterious
unproved soul understands -

wiring of Heaven and Earth -
metaphor, story, truth, as one.