Silhouetted Against the Stars

                        Silhouetted Against the Stars

     Tony didn't want to leave yet.  The sky was still cloudless, the air extremely clear.  The stars would be crystalline tonight.
     He wanted to look up at the tall slender wind turbine against the stars.
                                      * * *
     The sky had fully darkened to a radiant black.  Cygnus the Swan was sailing along the crystalline Milky Way, straight overhead and thus high above the slender spinning  blades of the wind turbine, when Tony heard what Miss Applegate called his Voice.
     He took his notebook out of his backpack, then began to write in the faint glow of starlight.  Though he could not easily read what he had neatly written, he could see the black writing on the pale white paper, and thus he could write line by line down the page.

             On a Starry Night

Look at all that flash and tatter out there:
Nuclear sparks hurtling through a void
Laced with waves of energy.
And spinning as happy as could be
In the midst of that vast celestial desert
Is Earth, blessed with water, blessed with land,
Blessed with a gentle, steady dose of sunshine:
An oasis which the Creator chose as a cradle.

Matter which has been ordered into the form of life
Seems to be only a tiny fraction
Of all the matter in the universe.
Most matter seems to be unliving,
Unless we believe that fiery gases and chunks of frozen nitrogen
Are alive.
But only a small portion of living matter
Thinks,
Unless we believe that viruses and vegetables and ancient sequoias
Can think.
And only a small, small portion of thinking matter
Ponders its origin,
Unless we believe that apes and elephants and the singing whales
Can ponder.
That leaves
Us.
We see no clear bridge between star and starfish,
Nor between starfish and human child,
And so we ponder how we came to be.

There must have been some force that challenged
The randomness of existence,
And won.


     Tony looked up at the towering black wind turbine, silhouetted against the stars.  The blades no longer spun, for the breeze had settled at dusk. 
     As the wind turbine seemed completely at home as it stood atop the mountain, so it seemed completely at home among the stars.


                       from Adirondack Green

                       John Slade
                       Woodgate International
                       http://www.woodgateintl.com/