What Light: This Week’s Poem: Steve Downing
Read "The Case for Intelligent Design" by Steve Downing, this week's winning poem selected by Marian Haddad.
The Case for Intelligent Design
Whats all the bahooey about Intelligent Design?
Besides the professional skeptics, who doubts it?
Garage-door-openersrandom selection?
Rush Limbaughsheer good
luck? Deer runs into your car at speedbad luck?
Not likely.
And, lets concede, intelligence does not need to
be nice to be credible.
To be intelligent, you only have to know a thing or two.
How to rub a couple of stones together to create
heavy water.
How to count backward by threes while having a colonoscopy.
Can you tell the clod whos fallen in front of you
on the sidewalk to quit
whining and get up, get out of the way?
Thats intelligence.
Charles Darwin wouldve stopped and asked the clod about his
parents sense of balancedid any of his
siblings have trouble staying
on their feet?would he like a coffee?
Who designed this vale of tears? We cant say.
Maybe it was Kurt Vonnegut. Maybe Guido Sarducci.
Whoever it was, should we be talking about it in
our schools
and car-pools and public restrooms?
absolutely.
We talk about faith circles, fornicating neighbors,
animals that
eat their young, with no concern about
corrupting our kids or
becoming Western Europes joke-butts.
My friends: you may well hate how your new shower
curtain is off-gassing.
This does not mean your uncle was a monkey.
Poetics
The smartest sentence ever written is by Niels Bohr, a quantum physics theorist: We are suspended in language. Wish Id said that. All my stuff is storytellingpoetry, mediation reports, grant proposalseverything. A limitation, but there it is. The writers I read (John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, others) are all terrific storytellers. I cant even mimic them, so I do it this way. My favorite poet is Louis Jenkins. If I could write prose poems like his, Id stop everything else and just pretend to be Louis, period.
Biography
Steve Downing has a B.A. from St. Johns University in Collegeville, MN and has been a teacher, house painter, salesperson, musician, theater technician, freelance writer, conflict resolution mediator, and, since 2001, Executive Director of MacRostie Art Center in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.