Law of Exponents
Poem - by John Reinhart
So it happens like this.
New settlers arrive, they round up bricks from the prairie,
from the hills, from the valleys. Wild bricks.
These folks are new. They know nothing
about bricks. Many of the bricks
die in captivity. Die of malnutrition. Die
of enclosed spaces. Unwept. Sandy colored
bricks, red bricks, old chipped and worn bricks.
With utilitarian uniformity, survivors are piled
atop one another to form south-facing foundational walls.
Only the south. We don't build with bricks,
preferring to leave them to their natural ranges, living
in wooden huts and lean-tos. These new arrivals must be
transplanting some otherworldly practice that required
strong south walls, religious, superstitious, just plan practical -
they looked good the first year. As the bricks settled
in, got to know one another, then began fraternizing, marrying,
multiplying in the way that happens when you leave bricks alone,
suddenly the buildings began to shift. A year later, tipping.
By year three already some of the taller buildings fell north
as the bricks multiplied, the little ones growing to adulthood
in only a few months. By the fourth year, there wasn't a brick
building still standing, the bricks scampering into safety
in the woods or burrowing in sand. Since their various habits
had been so upended and new cultures transferred,
these new brick were unpredictable, forming new societies
with anarchic structures previous generations could only dream
or fear. The only colonizers left had moved in with us by then,
our little houses offering little comfort but stability.
In tidal world, the seas set the rules, but where no sea exists,
no one expects to find their very bones ruled by nature's quietest
citizens, the ones living in caves, in burrows, on tree branches.
These minute beings fall easily to our whims unless we recognize
that one is merely one part, one fraction of a multitude becoming
the future. Life is more powerful than those who live it,
each grain of sand a mountain waiting to be born.