Notty Bumbo


 

Lucretius Rides The Waves

Lucretius posits the soul
Occupies all intervening spaces,
Atoms dispersed among atoms
Like a puzzle hidden
Within the confining centuries,
Amber from the Mesozoic,
Riding the backs of mastodons
Dressed in fine satins and myrrh.
What rose in the ancestors
Drifts downwind,
Carries the pollens offered by the first bees,
Asked to officiate on the holiest of days
Over the joining of wisdom and ancient oaks.
What it feels like to the surrounding viscera
Might be compared to meteors,
Traveling the long dark,
Always wondering if they might one day
Be among the chosen,
To fall, to enter with ecstatic grace,
The rarefied air of this singular body,
To own it, be owned by it,
Knowing time is short to departure,
To rise at last into that same air,
But never to wander the stars again,
Until the containing body evaporates,
Becomes itself meteoric and grand,
Birthing new atoms as yet to decide,
If they will become flesh,
Or dwell among these solemn trees.


 

Notty Bumbo is a writer, artist, and poet living in Fort Bragg, California. His work has been published in a number of small journals and presses, including the Amphigoric Sauce Factory, Words Without Walls, Poesis, Telling Our Stories Press, Calabash Cadence’ Taisgeadan, and Amazon Publishing. He has recently been responsible for Questor’s Odyssey, a daily commentary on life as we seldom notice it.

 

(Featured Image: The Amber Room (Yantarnaya Komnata) at the Catherine Palace, Saint Petersburg)