Evolution Ghazal

I first learned about ghazals in the early to mid 1990s, from a short note in Lynx. There was very little about the form in that note, basically that a ghazal had couplets that were independent of each other. The form immediately captured me, and I wrote a number of ghazals.

Also, about that time, I read Richard Dawkins' book, The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins made his reputation as a writer on evolution, although he is recently much more notorious as one of the "new atheists." In any case, I was really taken by this book, the first of his that I read.

These two things came together in my imagination, and the poem below is the result. It first appeared in Lynx XI:1, February 1996, p. 55. (Although Lynx is now online, it was still a print publication then.) This ghazal also reflects my concern with religion.

Geometric mud rising from its primeval bed

assumes a vector of flight slanting into clouds

Stacked cubes spheres cones tetrahedrons—

art strips the mountain to its idea

Binary holes etched on a compact disk

spell the numbers of any song you care to hear

Wind-scoured dust drifts across the flatlands

to form a bank across the dry stream

Adam/Eve—another binary pair—1 and 0

the lodgepole pine next to the rising moon

Out of these two, endlessly chained,

anything you can name can be named

Thirteen reclining at table for supper

another pattern to etch into song

Christ's clay cup, shattered in the dance of opposites—

out of its shards, a new music breaks

Comments

[Fergus]

Hi, Gino,
I particularly like these words for the fact that I wrote a poem using "1's and 0's" -
note: right alignment
Sochma(gentle one
…………………all the 0′s and 1′s
in all the web
cannot make the characters
for me to write the words
to tell her
what she means to me!!!!!!!!