Monkey Puzzled

 

For my first post of 2023 I thought I would get a bit philosophical and so I chose this photograph of the sky looking North through one of the Monkey Puzzle trees in our front garden. It was a beautiful clear night when the stars seemed to be everywhere you looked. I wrote this poem in celebration of how magnificent is the cosmos and how insignificant am I.

Monkey Puzzled

There are many philosophical things to find out about.

How did it all begin and what came before?

Is there an all knowing and all seeing being?

Is he a she and is there one, none or more?

There are many disparate things to care and shout about.

The price of sprouts, polar bears and the demise of planet Earth,

And after a terminal breath, is there spiritual life after death?

Do souls exist at all and in perpetuity from the moment of birth?

There are many fabulous things to wonder and spout about.

Multiverses, the equivalence of mass and energy, singularities big and small,

Is the Universe curved or flat or simultaneously both like Schrödinger’s cat?

Is there meaning and purpose for each diverse and unlikely bit of life at all?

There are infinitely many more things to find out about.

In the past, the present and future and why with age increasing, time locally gathers pace?

Why are we here at all, is intelligent life cosmologically common or actually relatively rare?

And at the terminus where will all we have found out go, if we’re ultimately lost from grace?

George Roberts