~
Another World the Equal of This One
If we learn anything from Nature, it’s that uniqueness
is the sincerest form of imitation. In a garden of beans
all the bauble pods are alike in mimicking one another.
The semblance of a thing is never quite the thing itself.
Thus, “in the ballpark” isn’t equal. More a quicksilver
echo in a mist. Here we see Adam, there an Adamo.
As a result, on Earth Prime a goal is reflex. Achieved.
They pray for all they’ve yet to imagine or don’t pray.
The way God is an amplification, a selfie enhanced
until it defines some optimum image of the subject,
so approximate nations would have a populace who
lack the unseemly and any preponderance of failure,
though what they’d overlooked would make us laugh:
the Unified Field moronic, droll; warfare a bafflement.
Here, slackers wax eloquent on social responsibility;
there, they resemble Gandhi and gaze into an iWall.
What whole is unaltered by the sum of its parts? What
blunder of brief life doesn’t pull at its face in wonder?
If one reality shines, a doppelganger may iridesce,
comparable in loveliness but ratbaggery nonetheless.
~
Roy Bentley, a finalist for the Miller Williams prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City, has published 8 books; including American Loneliness from Lost Horse Press, who just published a new & selected: My Mother’s Red Ford. He is the recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, and fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs and Ohio Arts Council. Poems have appeared in Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel Journal, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Rattle and Shenandoah among others. Hillbilly Guilt, his latest collection of poems, won the 2019 Hidden River Arts / Willow Run Poetry Book Award.