A Million Universes

"And I say to any man or woman, let
your soul stand cool and be composed
before a million universes."

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

The song of songs melodically darkens
time's door, a shadow and presence
of celestial rhyme that clocks the
orbits of myriad stars as closely
as the pulse of our beating hearts.

We walk through innumerable lives
clustered anatomically in time,
one on one spirit shapes, a chorus
of sounds, a quantum rainbow of
consequences so profound, we see
them only in a curling fire of death
and sacrifice.

But religion is a weekend picnic of
the soul; eternity a truth beyond
all we know; God has not forgotten us
yet, nor our rainbow reasoning so
bestowed we question the purpose of
quantum time; its innumerable lives,
and symmetry of two plus two
arithmetically, and logic of e = mc2
alphabetically, fashioned dot by dot
on a screen so surreal, it's almost
more than we can bear.

Authors note: The content of this poem is inspired by Marcus Chowen's "The Universe Next Door," which deals with the theory that quantum mechanics allows the coexistence of innumerable, closely aligned but slightly or substantially different universes.