Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, BEFORE BALBOA, by ROBIN LAMPSON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

BEFORE BALBOA, by                    
First Line: The pacific was there before balboa and magellan perceived
Last Line: And fashioned his pioneer microscopes to pry open to his patience an inner infinity.
Subject(s): Pacific Ocean


The Pacific was there before Balboa and Magellan perceived it: its curents
Had churned from New Guinea to Peru, from Panama to China, from Japan to Alaska,
For as many milleniums as the Mediterranean had swept from Phoenicia to the Straits of Gibraltar;
And the moon had lifted and lowered its tides on the shores of California and Borneo
Longer, perhaps, than the gentle Aegean had lapped at the seacoast of Greece.
The wise children of China and the primitive, guileless Polynesians anciently navigated
The waves of the restless Pacific -- but the greatest of oceans, with its fishes and whales,
Was timelessly there, antedating the eye and the oar of the earliest man.

And that vaster Pacific of the sky, the thalassa behind the visible stars
With its unseen archipelagoes of suns, had twinkled and whirled in the earth-enveloping
Dark through infinite cycles -- before Galileo magically drew it
Through the telescope's tube to the feeble but insatiable and marvelling eye of mankind.

Even so the teeming Pacific of the subvisible had surged and swirled forever,
Hidden within the ultimate innermost pinpoint of our flesh's own vision,
Bared from man's knowledge by the narrower Darien of the bare eye's inherent myopia --
Beyond reach of our obtuse huge spears of perception, laughing at the blunt knives of our learning
Until Master Antonius van Leeuwenhoek ground his four hundred delicate lenses
And fashioned his pioneer microscopes to pry open to his patience an inner infinity.





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