Coming Down from Heaven

  Coming Down from Heaven

Grand spaces are supposed to make us feel

The world is wonderful, like symphonies

Presume to capture skies and make us kneel

Before the universe.  Large symmetries,

Like Khufu’s pyramid, or Newton’s squared

Principia, or like the perfect spheres

We used to guess composed the cosmos, paired

As idealities beyond our tears,

Are backgrounds to our widest thoughts and dreams.

And what arises as resonant as

These three-dimensioned shapes?  Their meaning beams

With what the gem-cubed Holy City has.

  Yet what we really are is in the play

     Of atoms’ balances in DNA.