Should you find yourself growing disenchanted
with this self-infatuated world, its will to violence
and domination—step away a while, and walk 

in silence, slowly, round the parkland lake;
there are bulrushes at water’s edge, their ancient
presences and generations; attend, they will

reveal their secrets, how their slender height
and loveliness hold roots in mud and water,
how they host aphids and the tiniest of larvae;

be stilled a while, by their graced companionship,
as they lean and list together, gossiping in the breeze,
hiding and revealing swan, coot and moorhen

behind their modest skirts; they are testaments
to the eternal, from Moses in his reed-basket
to spacecraft adrift amongst the nebulae; listen

to the sibilant psalms they sing, and reassess
your own high principles, evolution, perhaps,
and the dense entanglements of consciousness.