Gifts of Disorder

Joan Waltermire

Turbulence sings in a woodcock’s wing
purls in stony streams
blooms in chambers of the heart

Light scatters blue over distant mountains
shatters to rainbows in prisms of snow
bursts into suns on rippling ponds

A star unspools a double helix
amid the clamor of extinctions
spawns cells, fins and scales, feathers, fur
spins out threads of speech and music

All
gifts of disorder
bounty of radiance
mercies of chance

The Science

I wrote this poem as a response to one written by a workplace friend who attributed the beauty of the world to a Christian God. I am an agnostic and skeptic, so I answered his poem with this one asserting that it was instead the destruction of a static ‘god-driven’ perfection in our world’s physical and biological systems that created this beauty. In systems like fluid motion and light propagation, it is the disturbance of perfect flow that gives us beauty. The audible air turbulence we hear in the diving woodcock’s wing vibrations and the visible destruction of unity we see when snowflake prisms tear white light into its many constituent colours are such examples. 

Disorder is the basis of much of our world’s beauty;

The sun’s Radiance provides the energy to power almost all of life;

Chance re-sorts and modifies chromosomes during reproduction and creates genetic variation that may even lead to new species. 

The Poet

Joan Waltermire is a retired woman who lives in Vermont, in the United States. She has a Master’s degree in botany and spent her working life as the Curator of Exhibits in a small science museum where she was able to imagine, design and build exhibits indoors and out, about all sorts of subjects. This is the first poem she has submitted for publication.

Next poem: Left by Cristabelle Garcia