“At the Grave of Teilhard de Chardin,” by Daniel Tobin

Poetry faculty member and alumnus Daniel Tobin was recently featured in Berfrois. Read an excerpt from “At the Grave of Teilhard de Chardin” below:

At the Grave of Teilhard de Chardin

Let the inhabitants of the rock sing…
Isaiah, 42:1

(Current)

In this river’s perpetual haste I am already always
arrived, always already departed, the constant
wanderer among the hosts of different worlds,

arrow and mark, the course through which I make
things to make themselves, everything irreversible,
the syntax in the enzyme’s shape, the atom’s charges

composing from within into a grammar of things—
autocatalysis of particle into molecule into cell
until the eyes form the way swirls form in water,

patterns risen out of patterns, until the patterns
desire to know. This sweeping out of savannahs,
over continents, across steppes—their driven waves—

attests the spur: my own long indigent venture on.
Take this one with his kit-box, his tools, the pressed
moons of bread he keeps to offer Mass, he’s shuttled

from Auvergne to Egypt, Sussex to Belgacoum,
has barged the Huang-ho, mule-trained the Gobi,
yet he knows all of space “is a veil without a seam.”

Read the rest of this poem here: https://www.berfrois.com/2021/01/from-at-the-grave-of-teilhard-de-chardin-by-daniel-tobin/