What We Fear

Sunspot Loops

—Photo by NASA, taken on a "quiet day"
for the sun, meaning there were no storms 
on its surface

CREDIT TO PARADISE

—Kenneth Patchen

The golden blood of the sun

Floods down in splendid abandon;

And what is full of dread

Dreams within the heart—for look,

We expect most from what we fear.

Even in this sun, which spreads its glorious

Image on our lives, is only caught

Again by the great frozen hand

Which tossed it forth. For think,

Wouldn't it be more a sun

If just once it could elude Him? If just once

It missed the relentless fingers?

The great can be little.

The fun of being God would be

In being nothing;

To really live, we should be dead too.

Isn't all our dread a dread of being

Just here? of being only this?

Of having no other thing to become?
Of having nowhere to go really

But where we are?

What power has the sun

If it must remain the sun?
We are afraid that one day the hand

Will not catch us when we come;

That the remorseless fingers will not close over us.

And I think that is our strongest will—

The reason all our dreams of paradise

Are dreams of an unlimited disorder

In a lawless anonymity.

______________________ 

—Medusa