I'm not going to lie to you,
the sky is made out of birds
as far as I can tell. And I suspect
nobody but me suspects that hell
is in fact, one big bottomless
chlorinated swimming pool. It
isn't even heated. Your fingers
get so wrinkly
Let's not accept the myths
we've been given. It's not
enough to be skeptical, let's
make our own or something. Why,
there is enough material! Reams
and reams, we could easily fashion
models to predict the universe
into any shape it seems.
2 comments:
I love imagining the visions that early explorers to Australia encountered in the outback. According to reports from the 1800s, the Bronzewings were countless in their numbers and flocks would 'rise for over a quarter of a mile', the “whirring of their wings being deafening”.
Also, explorer Matthew Flinders’ description of a flock of Short-tailed Shearwaters in Bass Strait in 1798: “There was a stream of from fifty to eighty yards in depth, and of three hundred yards, or more, in breadth; the birds were not scattered, but flying as compactly as a free movement of their wings seemed to allow; and during a full hour and a half, this stream of petrels continued to pass without interruption, at a rate little inferior to the swiftness of pigeons. On the lowest computation, I think the number could not have been less than a hundred million. Taking the stream to have been 50 yards deep by 300 in width, and that it moved at the rate of thirty miles an hour, allowing 9 cubic yards of space to each bird, the number would amount to 151,500,000.”
And then there’s the American Passenger Pigeon. In 1810 it was estimated that a flock contained 2,230,272,000 birds with accounts of the migration “darkening the sky” while “the weight of their numbers broke great branches from the trees”.
Just imagine…
The imagery you conjure manages to be both oppressive and uplifting. A definition of awe, perhaps.
Also from the outback, I love the creation myth conceived by (some tribes of) Aborigines that the universe was dreamed into being, out of an original formlessness.
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