Before Beginnings

2011

Before every beginning there are always preliminaries.

This poem was begun
before ever my fingers tapped the keys.
Like long-distance runners lapping the track,
inchoate thoughts pound round,
jostling for ascendancy
before settling into place,
breasting the tape to cross the line.

Can one ever unravel,
to the primary impulse,
the tangle of factors that begat these thoughts
and everything, for aeons back, behind them?

If there ever, upon a time, was ‘once’,
a point before the start of ‘always’,
surely it was this:
a rooted, raw propensity
to metamorphose
or transmogrify.

It still persists,
made manifest in human-kind:
the incarnation
of create, make, shape.

Let there be…

Poems for Artemis