A Poem by Richard Fein

EVOLVING TOWARD LIGHT

 

Those evolving fins,

those protolegs that skulked amid mud

and neither wholly swam nor wholly walked,

yet those nascent limbs

pushed aside riverbed foliage and slime,

while ancestral eyes were blinded

by a fog of upturned muck and rotting plants.

But that same murkiness also shielded

fins, legs, eyes, and the germinal brain

from bigger more hungry fish

for yet another day, for yet another generation.

And so in time their myriad issue

hoisted their floppy bodies up on ever stronger legs

that finally carried them out of the swamp.

And on dry land their clouded vision cleared through the eons,

till now they behold the light of the sun,

our singular, at times stark, at times succoring, star.

 

 

 

Richard Fein was a finalist in The 2004 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition A Chapbook of his poems was published by Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been published in many web and print journals such as  Cordite, Reed, Southern Review, Roanoke Review,  Birmingham  Poetry Review,  Mississippi Review, Paris/atlantic,  Canadian Dimension, Black Swan Review, Exquisite Corpse, Foliate Oak,  Morpo Review, Ken*Again   Oregon East,  Southern Humanities Review, Morpo, Skyline, Touchstone, Windsor Review,   Maverick, Parnassus Literary Review, Small Pond, Kansas Quarterly,  Blue Unicorn, Exquisite Corpse, Terrain Aroostook Review, Compass Rose, Whiskey Island Review, Oregon East, Bad Penny Review, Constellations, and many, many others.