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When Theofanis walked into the park,
he saw his brothers sprawled beneath two trees,
discussing something on the Alpheios.
So Theofanis said, “Soterios
and Yannis, what is it you two remark?”
“The bridge,” Soterios replied. “It lies
upon those two green banks down to the south.”
And Theofanis saw it then: a thin
stone line where black shapes moved, and so he said:
“Mark well the structure of it, brothers. See
its purpose, to create a passage where
men walk on water without any fear.
Foundations laid on land, it sprang from stone,
and then possessed a purpose wholly strange,
apart from land and all its elements.
So too is man, created from the beasts,
an aspirant to higher things than that
with which he was created at the start.”
“But then,” Soterios remarked, “I see
our lives much more between the banks
than in good earth, and that seems very sad.
To watch the people cross our Alpheios,
one easily can guess they have a goal,
be it the east or western bank, to reach.
Imagine trips of not some seconds, but
of three billions of years, since life began.
If we did rise above the lowly beasts
and learned to wish for better life, some glimpse
of things beyond the stars, then that is all
a western bank to us, and we long left
our bestial nature on the eastern shore.
Still, we are well above the flowing water:
the bridge may cast us down to drown and die
without our reaching sacred heights of thought,
as did those species, great and ancient long
before us, gone and buried into time.”
“Young Yannis,” said the brothers to the youth,
“you have been very quiet all this time.
Are there not some thoughts you’d care to share?”
“Well,” Yannis said. “The bridge is quite like us,
and it is very sad, just as you say.
But where in nature have you seen a bridge?
Are they not sometimes built without our hands?
Just yesterday I stumbled on a bridge
of stones and dirt, and not unlike to man’s.
The river sediment had ‘built’ it there.
You, Soterios, you speak of man
achieving something sacred in his life,
and Theofanis, you still represent
our thoughts as miracles wrought out of void,
as though we men do represent the best
of all the beasts that ever were alive.
This bridge of dirt and stone, it has no base.
These banks are both the same. Indeed the whole
is earth and thus, created of itself,
it forms no more than it contained before.
Those men of vaunted progress, all they are
are stones and dirt, quite blindly building up
a bridge that long ago made crossing safe.
It now becomes a ziggurat so high
the river’s width is more than twice surpassed
when matched against the bridge’s untamed height.
To cross the water into sacred thoughts
is now made much more difficult to men.
The rules of nature still apply to us:
we build our bridges out of our own selves—
we base them from our minds; but in the end
the other shores are also flesh and bone.”
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