Humanist Voices in Verse:

This week we’re featuring a poem by a new contributor, Sylvia Ramos Cruz. Ramos Cruz is a physician and surgeon, gardener and world traveler who loves words and what they can do. Her poems aspire to give voice to a moment born of her own experience that sparks an intimate thought in her readers.

If you’d like to contribute original poetry to Humanist Voices in Verse, write to hnn@americanhumanist.org with “Poetry” in the subject line. Please send no more than three poems for consideration per week.

Origins

-reflections on Blue Pool, painting by Helen Frankenthaler, 1985

Brain, heart, spine poised to swim,
slither, take the skies, tread on land.

She leaves us standing
before the Sphinx—

with Gregor Mendel one hundred years before,
carefully cross-pollinating scores of common peas
unraveling the roots of our heredity

and Darwin pondering barnacles, Galapagos fossils,
wrens transmuting into finches in his garden
divining how one species turns into another.

Easier, perhaps, to have stood with Botticelli,
agape at the birth of Venus,
Aphrodite rising from the stirrings of Poseidon
fully-formed, exquisite    ad infinitum.

—Sylvia Ramos Cruz