THE BIG QUESTIONS 1: WHAT IS IT ALL FOR?

My first poem for the National Poetry Month (NaPoMo)---April 2013. Am exploring poetic answers to the BIG QUESTIONS. (Cosmological, Philosophical. Why not? Make this exercise worth it. Stuart Clark listed down questions on The Universe in his Big Questions book, and Simon Blackburn his list in The Big Questions: Philosophy. Our first question is from Blackburn: WHAT IS IT (Life) ALL FOR?

 

 

IN SEARCH OF MEANINGS

Missing the many splendored thing

is one way of looking at this search.

How really far out there do we need

to fly, or espy for the god particle we

seemed to have lost in the process?

Why look behind the stars or in them?

Did we not lose our angels coming off
the crib or the direst cranny for shelter?
They do not grow with us, nor guide us.
Absconding, they quietly creep away.

Courage and devilment open our eyes

to what stories we could live with or by,
or what places to board up or occupy.
Orphans at birth, we are alone at death.
What we mean here is what we make.

The womb is a meaning we cannot do

without: our final breath is a call:
Mother, hold me. Our first cry is a call:
Mother, love me. And then we grow old
shaping up all excess purposes and ends.

The tomb is yet another meaning we

scarcely begin to understand before it
pulls us to its urgent demand: living
to die trying to live while dying is easy
may yet be the meaning we struggle for.
 

---ALBERT B. CASUGA