Space For Creation Poem by Ananta Madhavan

In our ancient Indian lore
The cosmos we called ‘Srishti'
Is made of five elements:
Earth, Water, Fire, Air, Space.
Perhaps they combine or dissolve
Into subatomic particles or galaxies.
Chemicals compound, evolve, life
May emerge in species, creatures
Have birth and death; our kind
Has Reason, sensibility for form,
And best of all, Imagination. We fancy
Formless entities and abstract nouns,
And dare to postulate that "God is a verb",
As Buckminster Fuller did. Action is piety.

In Space there is no up or down,
No north or south, no left, no right,
No past, no future. Is there Reality?

Asked about his contradiction,
Walt Whitman wrote, "Very well,
I contradict myself, I am vast,
I contain multitudes".
If you contend, as J-P. Sartre did,
That existence precedes essence,
Do you nullify yourself?
Creation must exist before Nullity and Void.

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