The Crown of Creation / Poems

This poem was suggested in a flash by a paragraph in Michael McClure's book Scratching the Beat Surface in which he quotes Ernst Haekel in the words used here as an epigraph Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. He goes on to say in explanation Haekel meant that the individual in his growth from meeting of sperm and ovum at conception lives out in fetus the growth and evolution of his tribe; that first he is an amoeba then a colonial organism then an invertebrate then a lancet then a fish until at last he is a mammal and a human. Reading this brought together for me various strands of thought into one clear picture in harmony with the cosmological picture of the Muslim saints: Man is a little cosmos the cosmos is a big man. And the view that Allah created the entire creation as a setting as it were into which He placed man the jewel the perfect diamond as the seal and culmination of this creation. ________________________________________________