So, this morning I took my wife to Newcastle (Upon Tyne), our nearest big city, to visit a school where she is shortly to begin a placement as part of the training she must do for her Post-Graduate Teaching Certificate. While she was visiting the school, I sat in the car and watched the world go by – a wet and windy world it was. I had also been thinking, that morning over breakfast, about wisdom and purpose. Those two parts of my day came together in the poem. Let me know what you think?
Beyond Ourselves
Here I am
sitting in my car
as the autumn wind
defragments our trees
as a crow slides by,
as rain falls
and some old lady wheels by
wrapped in her anorak.
We're made for wisdom,
it's in us.
Dinosaurs were never going to ferment
their experience into anything
worth drinking,
and apes were never going to rewrite
history. But we, car-sitting
wind-watching, scooter-riding
sapiens, have it in us
to reach beyond ourselves.
We're not here to have our shopping
delivered
or to be entertained
or to be a biological burp
as the cosmos digests itself.
We're not designed for space-travel
for time-hopping
for melding our minds with machine,
our beyond
is beyond ourselves, writing a wisdom
our universe sorely needs.