literature

To Darwin, on Hearing of the 22 Chronometers

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Literature Text

Did the ticking drive you mad?
Twenty two clocks to tie you
to Greenwich, to the damp land,
to the paved streets and spires
and the blank glazed windows
of progress and age?  Did time
become fathoms deep, and the
dwindling abyss transform to
thoughts of deep, deep time?
The blind eyes of bottom dwellers,
the feelers of those that survived,
the wellings of primordial soup
perhaps flavoured your thoughts.

(you never saw them. We know
you never saw the elemental broth,
the creatures like to dinosaurs
in a Blackpool of phosphorescence.
But the mystery, perhaps. The thought
that things exist beyond your imagining.
The thought that time stretches, deep
and wider than the books all told.
Perhaps that ocean thought stirred you.)


And when you thought of long
lived turtles in their shells and short
lived finches with precision beaks,
did you think of second hands and hours,
the life of a gnat and a continent,
the age of the rocks on which the
lizards sunned? Did, perhaps, each
degree of longitude between your feet
and the Greenwich mean, and the depths
of ocean between, seem like an age
in itself, your life fragile, stuttering
on the shore, and all your hopes placed
in wood and the subtle degrees of time?
Full title: To Darwin, on Hearing of the Twenty-Two Chronometers on the Beagle

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...this is awesome!