MAY DAY

by Bryan Merck

     “A superintellect has monkeyed with the physics,
       as well as with the chemistry and biology, and
       there are no blind forces worth thinking about
       in nature.”
                                                Fred Hoyle


In the final bit of the life of a star,
helium becomes carbon through nuclear synthesis
and an amazingly precise resonance level.
Fifty percent of my dry body weight is carbon.
If I find a pocket watch in the woods,
I can assume an intelligent watchmaker made it.

In the city park,
young girls twine ribbons around a Maypole.
Freud saw Maypoles as phallic symbols.
All of this goes back to the idea of a green god-king,
a generative myth. Spring is the reassuring return
of fecundity in the northern climes.

Earth, on its tilted axis, orbits a medium-sized star.
Apart from a galactic cataclysm, it will do this for the next few billion years.
What if we did not know this?

Technological advances make the ways of nature less mysterious.
Some questions yet remain unanswered. The constancy
of terrestrial events over long segments of time is not established.
Civilization may be 10,000 years or so old.
The earth has been here 4.5 billion years.

The phenomenal world carries clues of design--
the mystery of photosynthesis,  the exuberance of reproduction,
everyday birth and death. Irreducible complexity is evidenced in
my eyes, my gastrointestinal tract, my immune system with its memory,
and so on.

I see the continuum of galaxy, star, planet, life.
I see the hopeful detail in the Big Bang, altruism, conscience, love
as an act of will, Torah, Koran, New Testament, Tipitaka,
Tao Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, Book of Mormon.