God’s Uncertainty
By Peter Venable
Space-time coordinates: an ocean, midday.
Shore barely visible. Surface choppy,
blustery, foamy, white-capped.
A white gull floats in a trough,
appearing and disappearing
between swells, behaving
the way an infinitesimal elusive quark
pops and bursts from our snooping lenses.
The gull: the more one precisely measures its position,
the less its location can be gauged or even predicted.
The ocean-metaphor or quantum manifestation?
The gull – a feathered molecule or a quaver
riding on waves? Is its bobbing entangled
with a gull a mile away? Or one light year away
in the ocean above as a gull floats
on a planet’s sea around Alpha Centauri?
And is our particle planet
spinning around a nuclear sun,
popping in and out of vista
under some cosmic being’s
supreme subatomic microscope?