The Ecphorizer

Predators & Systems - two Poems

Dwight E. Humphries

Issue #37 (September 1984)

Predators

Do great white sharks
Experience religious ecstasy
When they feed
Do wolves have a god
A big wolf that sends game?
Do all the dangerous beasts
Have to deny instinct patterns
Evolved from simple things
That lived so long ago?

No matter how savage
The animal is;
Is it right to thin
The ranks to suit man?
They are products
Of superior shaping-
Whose forms are wedded
to their enviroment.
They are sacred
No matter what we feel
About them as they live out
Their fated lives.

Life consumes life-
It is a chain of being alive
To the very stars of the universe;
By death life is served,
The wild beasts save all
They prey upon
From death as a species,
And this may exist
Without a divine will,
Only a matter of hunger
That is simple
Compared to the thinking ape.
Divine or mundane, life continues
Victorious as limitless space.

Systems

Philosophy
And a delusional system
Differ only in the nature
Of insight.
One is artificial and the other
Is based in the inner being
Where elemental forces rage.

To assume a priori
Is to create ex nihilo
A ghost that may
have no true meaning.
A delusional system
Makes one the center
Of a different, perhaps hostile
Universe but it is at the center.

I am philosophical
One must be
To face what we accept as reality
But I miss my delusions,
The earth had meaning
For I saw to the cent
And to the edge of all.
Either way,
Philosophy or delusion
Implicate that I exist
And am reaching out
For the meaning of all things.

Our new poet this months is Dwight E. Humphries. When he is not soaring on poetical inspirations, he skydives. An ex-paratrooper and past editor of the Georgia State University Review, Dwight's principal occupation is journalist.

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Dwight E. Humphries

When Dwight Humphries is not soaring on poetical inspirations, he skydives. An ex-paratrooper and past editor of the Georgia State University Review, Dwight's principal occupation is journalist.