Comfort in Imperfection

This poem appears in the Spring 2019 issue of Modern Age. To subscribe now, go here.

The smallest birds see colors not there
For us, or so biologists say,
The same or their ilk who used to teach
That the animal view was deficiently grey,
Their spectrum drab from black to white.

Media-clips of scientist-talk,
(Assured, predictable, white-coat words)
Say instruments gather what flesh can’t prove;
How by faith one infers spectrascopical birds,
Iridescently visioned past blue and pink.

And it may be as they think.

Yet the seasoned mind’s eye looks up,
Aloft where the eagle’s drifting gaze
Scans us, discretely reckoning.
In the shy surmise of a tree-top thrush
Glimmers light unknown, enough to amaze.

It’s the common in thought we can trust:
That like birds our light is broken through,
Refracted into rainbow parts;
On earth we never see light true,
Till changed in flight our eyes are new.

Founded in 1957 by the great Russell Kirk, Modern Age is the forum for stimulating debate and discussion of the most important ideas of concern to conservatives of all stripes. It plays a vital role in these contentious, confusing times by applying timeless principles to the specific conditions and crises of our age—to what Kirk, in the inaugural issue, called “the great moral and social and political and economic and literary questions of the hour.”