The infinite orderliness of the natural world

Is past all wonder. Only I, ignorant, wonder

At common and colored and never-repeated curled

Slow growth of shells above sea and under.

A scum of seaweed is a jungle a green inch wide,

A man's lifetime long for seeing, naming, caring

To map it on one page. Spread there and dried,

It is one pattern for the mind's comparing

With Mind that remembers everything It made.

Caverns of almost nothing, and heavens, discover

Alike a little of the great calm of law obeyed.

Sun casts the year's same shadow over and over.

Out of shadow I, but no longer saying I,

Move myself from my self in an opening spiral,

Drawn toward the light in understanding why

One cell may be one cell yet see the spiral

Whole, and what slow accretion shaped the whole.

But there is more, a world in a tall fountain's

One waterdrop, more, fire in a crumb of coal,

And more worlds in the grains that make mountains.