Sample Poems by Peggy Miller
The Moment It Began
I was in English class.
The teacher, a failed priest, was talking about stones.
Or philosophy or epigrams maybe.
I answered his question: How can we know, I said,
we have never been a stone.
I was wrong, of course, stone being where we all began,
though few remember what it was like.
What Binds Us
The most silent of silences —
the least nothing of nothingness,
if not everywhere, then
hovering immeasurably small
somewhere behind the eyes,
evolved, they say,
out of unconscious muck
out of necessity or advantage,
daughter of the universe,
one probable manifestation of
the numerous dimensions.
We might wish to think
this golden capability
our sole possession, but it is not:
From inside this prison of mind,
we look
into the eye of a whale, a wolf,
to see awareness looking back.
The moment of connection
supersedes language:
I recognize you,
we say to one another with our gazes,
to life that watches back through
that glassy gate. Still,
I wonder if the wolf looks up
at a night sky like this one
and wonders.
Medusa
Some days my hands must hold my brain in.
If I forget, the dendrites grow their synapses,
stretching out to the farthest reaches of existence,
and I lose hope of ever getting back.
Lost in a forest of gray matter minutely clamping
dark matter, new dendrites reach for bosons
and the whirl of quasars.
I race through optic fibers
aimed for the cold promise of space.
Fusion
If everything has substance,
our impression of empty space now
teeming with the swirl of dark matter,
then transitions lose any significant demarcation,
like layered dessert, green, then orange, then red,
but all jello,
and a human loses her separateness,
being only a lump of the same
as surrounds her
sweeping from here to the outer reaches.
Her being equal to her not being,
she is merely a moving flavor
borrowing fabric from time and wood and air,
her mind waving out through
the great cosmic blend.