Enlightenment

after Tom Stoppard's Arcadia

How do we live in a world that's slowly winding down,

Spinning into the void, consuming itself in fire,

Heading for chill extinction in universal ash?

Is "wanting to know" enough? Or dancing amid the pyre?

Or seeking to be immortal in the glow of the world's renown?

How long can these sustain us while we're waiting for the smash?

How comforting to have lived in the Age of Enlightenment,

Secure in the classical concept of perfectibility:

A slow, steady ascent; a striving to regain;

Newtonian Law the root of our fixed stability;

Restoring the lost gardens, eager to attain

Arcadia: the crown of human accomplishment.

But Newton's physics cracks; chaos conceived the world:

I snap my playscript shut: a swirl of wind gusts

Into flame the dry brush of the barren African veldt;

In an ocean of ashes, islands of order violently hurled,

Mirages only, fractured fractals; security trusts

Only its own complacency, which the flame of a candle will melt.

Entrapped in entropy then, do we give up or go mad?

Out of chaos can there be order? Is that a justified stance?

If not, why do artists strive to impose a shape on the world?

Are hexameters patently pointless? Is rhyming merely a fad?

No: though poetry may be no weapon, and music no banner unfurled,

And we can't change our future by dancing - yet all we have left is the dance.