Uma
Soft gusts, the windows down, I’m reading the
Upanishads.
The parking lot is overfull.
It’s STEM night at my daughter’s elementary
school: programmable robotic arms,
volcanoes, mirror tricks,
prismed light and laser beams,
the fecund hollowness within the seed,
the crowding furrowed brows, delighted eyes,
the ancient wonder veiled,
but also intimated.
I close the book and think,
“What we can never comprehend
is that by which we comprehend the world.”
A toddler waiting with her mother near
the door grips spring’s first meadow garlic shoots,
lifts chubby fingers to her nose, leans back
her head, and laughs into a flaming sky.
Too easily, too easily,
we all word-wrap the mystery.
Sophia, Uma,
wisdom,
take my hand.
Steven Knepper teaches in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute. His poems have appeared in The Alabama Literary Review, The William and Mary Review, First Things, Presence, Pembroke Magazine, Seminary Ridge Review, SLANT, The American Journal of Poetry, and other journals.
Amethyst Review 