Discovery

Science is like an endless festival –
inventions popping up like champagne corks
and glasses bubbling with discovery.

Our noses pressed against the window pane,
we often wonder what is going on,
and who will pay for it.

Our eyes on stalks,
we get to see surreal happenings –
the Hubble spectacle of cosmic prodigies,

the towering nebulae,
Leviathans of outer space,
their dark clouds spawning stars.

Imagine, too, the strange, elusive particles
led blinking out of prediction
from their plasma galleries;

and curtains rising on a genetic stage
where actors, reendowed with foreign
properties, are faced with changing roles

or cloned into a sole identity, e.g.
a mouse decked with a human ear
(far more than nature ever dare).

We know by now that all discovery
is double-edged, and serves no single end;
that meanings are ambiguous;

that all things have a darker side,
an anti-matter, mutually
destructive when the two collide;

that there’s no finis to causation
and complexity; that questions ramify
in endless fractals;

that primum mobile remains unknowable;
that things we’ve come to know
remain mysterious;

and that no one has dissected yet
the tissue of self-awareness, laying bare
the filaments of what we really are.
 

- David Morphet 2002