Today they announced discovery
of poetry in a pill form.
Take one 3 times a day,
no prescription needed.
Those around me greeted the news
almost impassively,
as if a new species had arrived
with little fanfare,
and only a few muted smiles.
The reality eventually took hold,
as recognition that a long-sought marriage
had occurred, uniting disciplines and theory,
aspirations and ability,
onto a common path where
breakthroughs are not inevitable,
but result from continuous creativity.
We greet new pills for sleep with praise,
new pills for hearts with awe,
new pills for pain with relief,
new pills for pleasure with excitement.
How then should we greet this,
the first pill for the soul?
What emotion do we have
to acknowledge prolonged insight
into the nature of existence?
As we swallow this pill,
we marvel in the exhalation of voices
that resonate through centuries,
in caves, palaces, and prisons,
in prose, psalms, and stories,
in words jumping off rocks,
in the power that radiates
from the pen and from the mind
unleashed from rules.
This is the thought that exhorts us,
the thought that, like Sisyphus, is never enough
and pushes us harder, higher, and faster,
to converse inside a space
as powerful at this moment
as the universe above and below,
formed at the dawn of creation:
Two millennia of research
into the nature of the soul
have finally brought art and science together,
with millions of new inspirations,
visions that link faith and science
and faith.
Notes
This article was externally peer reviewed.
Funding: none.
Conflict of interest: none declared.
- Received for publication April 25, 2013.
- Revision received March 19, 2014.
- Accepted for publication April 21, 2014.
