The Fool's World

Ubiquitous Light 

 Poem by Debasish Mishra   

 From the Archive of Saint Augustine's Magazine
Volume 2, No. 1 (2023).

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour”
—William Blake

I see the world in a grain of sand,
each pixel is a panorama. The wing
of a butterfly carries the perimeter
of the sky and the eye of a fish
the oceans. Each teardrop glistens
with the glitter of galaxies
while each speck of light that raids
my room reflects a thousand suns.
There’s a nano-universe in everything
platonic ideas float around:
the everythingness of everything.
I am a metonym too: the eye
of boundless mankind—the light
that seeks light to discover
what it really is, where it belongs!