When I behold a rich landscape…all thought
of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

The negative charge
of an electron, turning,
burns across the surface
of the sun,
pulls the earth,
in its drastic and terrible
beauty, around the solar
system and through the galaxy-

one atom made
up of many.
And the heavens,
troposphere and exosphere,
orbit also, releasing our
whispers, our wishes
to the farthest
ends of space

and time
stopping at the edge
of blackness or the light
that awaits us all.

Yet the fall
back to earth, the restless
waves in the deepest seas,
the sunlit land, the leaves
becoming,
waving and
falling also
in their own alternation
beneath the oldest
and the youngest trees

that grow enfolding the world.

Khristan Doyle