Everything the newborn
sees, hears, tastes, touches, smells,
is bathed in the misty sheen of magic:
mothers milk, mothers hum, her breast,
the warm bath, air,
each, a miracle.
But as the baby becomes the boy,
the mist is shaved away,
layer by layer,
reason by reason,
until the man lives in a reality
unalloyed by spirit.
Then there is only concrete.
The drift of a car ride,
explained by internal combustion.
The float on the water
diminished by the science of buoyancy.
So the man changes the oil,
swims the race but looses
the miracle of the sea
and the wonder of fire fly rainbows
flitting from crystal globes
dangling on the sun porch.
Then the old man who once
was the newly born
now is dying to find that
mystic world again.
Even, just, a moment of magic,
some unexplainable something
just outside his stretching grasp,
enough mustard seed of faith
to re-believe that all is not stone,
that inevitable death is not
the end of stuff,
but a new beginning in a
golden webbed world.