Entanglement
“Entangled particles, even though spatially separate, do not operate autonomously. . . . The outcome of what you do at one place can be linked with what happens at another place, even if nothing travels between the two locations – even if there isn’t enough time for anything to complete the journey between the two locations.”
– Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos
Entanglement is in our bones,
an unsurprising insight known
to any lover touched to tears
by memory flung past photons
across oceans and years.
Mathematics, that pure abstraction,
is a dry, boulder-strewn path to wisdom.
Better to quiet the mind,
watch the flocks of birds,
the schools of fish, the great herds
shifting as one.
Better to study how an altered chromosome
in an ear of corn can starve the monarch larvae,
how insects and birds that feed upon the grub
wither and die, and pests without predators
overrun crops engineered to spread poison.
How unforeseen destruction climbs the food chain,
rung by hungry rung.
Outside the algorithm
the engine of a worm’s digestion
can transform a mulberry leaf to silk,
while deodorant and refrigeration
leave a planet defenseless
against solar radiation.
We have come to this dangerous place
pretending that each violence or tenderness
does not echo through all time and space,
that we do not burn at the touch of napalm
on a child’s flesh, that we are not refreshed
by cool water offered in succor
by a soldier sent to pull the trigger
in the war on our own terror.
It is no excuse for viciousness to confess
that when babes were seared to their mothers’ breasts
in Al-amerieh by our smart, pitiless missiles,
the attack on the Twin Towers became possible.
Or was it earlier, at My Lai, No Gun Ri,
Hiroshima, Wounded Knee?
Such horrors do not vanish with no trace
but linger, twisting the fabric of grace
like a bed sheet taut with malaria.
What is that insistent dread
but the many hands of the dead
clutching the womb of this fallow land?