Your Instruments and Calculations

Your instruments and calculations

do not fix the start of time
   before storytellers had tales to tell;

nor upon cosmic scales assay
   the universe’s weight in bushels of wheat,

or sound its depth in fathoms
   like a hand-fed knotted line;

those dotted ink-blot images should not be mistaken
   for the weft and warp this day is woven from;

and the night sky’s colour says more about
   stirrings of new life than death of all existence.

Your instruments and calculations,
   your infinite extrapolations.

Isn’t it more likely
   that if the mass of our ignorance

and its unknown
   but nonetheless definite location and momentum

were fed into your finest
   instruments and calculations,

we would be aliens in the world they revealed to us?

(c) 2012 Poetrivia