Creative Destruction

The demon ignorance is danced into defeat

By Shiva’s lifting legs. Destruction can create

When it gives birth to knowledge, source of all the arts

And creativity. Destruction’s dance will fate

Each cycle, spiral, unity, and all the parts

That reconstruct the world in Shiva’s frantic beat. 

 

Sweet memory, the mother of the poem, song,

And science—from their father, lightning insight, flash

Of rhythms, patterns crafted, chiseled into stone,

The words we sing and print from face and curve and dash.

 Remembering is memory—the shadow zone

That we construct, for all we know is right and wrong. 

 

But when play our music, lift our legs and dance, 

And when we sing our poetry, our memory

Remembers us to greater things, to newer things,

And we, together, join our hands, refuse to flee

And, as a chorus, know the poet’s words, and sings—

Then all the world in truest knowledge will entrance.