All creatures great and small
Changed our hearts.
Their furs or paws
Imprinted our flesh like tattoos,
Almost impossible to remove.
The remembrance of them all
Accounts our joy with the smiles.
We only go back to them again,
Just to rejoice their beauty,
Their divine existence on our planet.
Then we muse upon magic up in the sky,
Riddled with stars, young and old.
They enabled our minds to question the possibilities.
Like grains of sand,
They dance up there, the elusive magicians,
Entertaining us with their tricks.
We will ourselves to play the games
And find out how their magic works.
We refuse to surrender our efforts
To discover the creatures great and small
That must roam somewhere far in the distant corners of the sky.
An unfathomable sheer size of the cosmos
Bombards our minds like crowbars cracking our skulls,
Forcing us to open our minds more than we could ever imagine:
Pushing us beyond the television screens,
Baffling us with conflicts of religions,
Creating sophisticated dialogues,
And on and on and on.
The fact is that there is a multiplicity of stars,
We cannot discredit them at all.
Why must we create doubts upon the miracle of life up there?
It’s unfathomable for me to hear someone say, There is no life up there!
It just doesn’t make any sense to allow an awful waste of space
To exist all around us.
Eddie Swayze is a poet, performing artist, actor, visual artist, electronic music composer, and educator. He translates his poems into American Sign Language along his original composed electronic music and some videos. He discovered ASL poetry in the 80's through Peter Cook, Debbie Rennie, Clayton Valli, and other great ASL poets/performers.
His poetry has been published in The HandType Press, The Gallaudet University Press, The Clevis Press, The Tactile Mind Press, Dark Lady Press, The Talon Magazine, Forge, Science Poetry from Ontario, Canada, and a few more. He won two awards in ImageArt poetry reading under the annual glbt ImageOut Film Festival. His poetry performance is featured in a short clip in “The Heart of The Hydrogen Jukebox” by Miriam Lerner. He received two New York State Council on the Arts grants and four Strategic Opportunity Stipends grants.
He graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1995.
He uses GarageBand software in an iTunes laptop to create electronic music. He does not use GarageBand alone, but also records guitar, vibra tone, and other sound instruments, such as recording free music composing applications from iPhone4, even whistling, hitting a glass to make a ringing sound, recording cards shuffling, and so on. He also records several free downloaded electronic music composing software into GarageBand. Henceforth, it is not just loops in GarageBand that were made, it is beyond that.
The science fiction images were done in PhotoShop or Illustrator software, or both.
His web site address for anyone to learn about his work is: http://wildpoetperformanceartsandpoetry.blogspot.com/
All creatures great and small
Love this. The artwork goes very well with the poem to create a very complete story.
What a beautiful poem! Your biography is filled with wonderful achievements . I’m so very,very proud of you.
Keep on keeping on !!