Brain Music

No God would make a world in such poor taste,

scoffed Darwin, thinking of blind nature’s waste,

of creatures duplicate, ungainly, vile:

too many mollusks, slime without soul or style.

Better to hope the blood-lust brutes displayed

allowed the strong to shine like hammered blades,

that pyramid of dead led up to man.

The worst pain is the one without a plan.

Rather amoral pattern, godless law,

than thoughtless lion’s rank and hollow maw,

a meaningless decease, like Darwin’s daughter,

ill, dying young. His theory made this slaughter

proof-text of pain, her childhood sacrifice

near swallowed up in what is symbolized:

no Jesus healing with miraculous kiss,

just laws reliable and pitiless,

a world with no grace and no randomness.

Patterns in beasts’ acts are the sole witness

to a design by irony inspired:

when scientists mapped how the neurons fired

in the cortex of the brain when learning,

on-screen a melody was coldly burning.

Whether the deed that’s learned is right or wrong,

each synapse pattern plays an (unsigned) song.