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b'Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com\\n\\xa0\\nS3E7 TRANSCRIPT:----more----\\nYucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I\'m your host Yucca\\xa0\\nMark: and I\'m Mark,\\nYucca: And today we have a really special episode. We have, what was it that you called it? A.\\xa0\\nMark: Literary interlude.\\xa0\\nYucca: a, a bit of storytelling, dreaming and poetry for the spring, which a lot of us are in that place. And here in the Northern hemisphere where we\'re going into spring, where, Ooh, we want to get going.\\nWe want to, we want to just get out there, but it\'s still, still a bit nippy, not quite there yet. And so it\'s still that time of dreaming and storytelling. Getting ready for all of it.\\xa0\\nMark: Right. Yeah, it\'s that in between time and, and we, we were a little bit at a loss to know what to talk about today. So.\\nWe\'ve, we\'ve fallen back on on poetry and stories and that kind of thing. These are. The poems come from my book a red kiss, which is my second book after the atheopaganism book and is a collection of poems of mine going all the way back to 1993--selected poems, not all of them just the good stuff.\\nSo I\'m really happy to share. I write on a variety of different kinds of themes. So these are these sort of go all over the place. So settle in and we\'ll, we\'ll start out with an atheist prayer :\\xa0\\nAN ATHEIST\'S PRAYER\\nPraise to the wide spinning world\\nUnfolding each of all the destined tales compressed\\nIn the moment of your catastrophic birth\\nWide to the fluid expanse, blowing outward\\nKindling in stars and galaxies, in bright pools\\nOf Christmas-colored gas; cohering in marbles hot\\nAnd cold, ringed, round, gray and red and gold and dun\\n\\xa0\\nAnd blue\\n\\xa0\\nPure blue, the eye of a child, spinning in a veil of air,\\nWarm island, home to us, kind beyond measure:\\xa0 the stones\\nAnd trees, the round river flowing sky to deepest chasm, salt\\nAnd sweet.\\n\\xa0\\nPraise to Time, enormous and precious,\\nAnd we with so little, seeing our world go as it will\\nRuing, cheering, the treasured fading, precious arriving,\\nFear and wonder,\\nFear and wonder always.\\n\\xa0\\nPraise O black expanse of mostly nothing\\nThough you do not hear, you have no ear nor mind to hear\\nPraise O inevitable, O mysterious, praise\\nPraise and thanks be a wave\\nExpanding from this tiny temporary mouth this tiny dot\\nOf world a bubble\\n\\xa0\\nGoing out forever meeting everything as it goes\\nAll the great and infinitesimal\\nGracious and terrible\\nAll the works of blessed Being.\\n\\xa0\\nMay it be so.\\n\\xa0\\nMay it be so.\\n\\xa0\\nMay our hearts sing to say it is so.\\n\\xa0\\nYucca: Mark. That was beautiful.\\nMark: Thank you. That\'s the one that I ended the atheopaganism book with actually there\'s a little one page chapter called what it looks like, and that\'s that\'s what\'s on that page.\\nYucca: The, the imagery, I just, just closing my eyes and listening, as you said that, and could just, just feel my. Changing perspective and flying through coming down from the galactic of you into the eye of the child. Just, just amazing.\\xa0\\nMark: Thank you.\\nso much. This is one called "Blessed". And it\'s got a dedication: for my people. You know who you are.\\xa0\\nYucca: Hm.\\nBLESSED\\nI am among the blessed.\\n\\xa0\\nI am of the kind who leaves the glaring tube, remembering\\nAnd goes to watch the moon rise silver through the trees\\nBreathing purple and chill, stinging pine.\\xa0 I am\\nAmong the blessed:\\xa0 I know the acacia, the first daffodil,\\nThe irises unsheathing cream and violet labia in the green wet of May.\\nI tune for the new music on the radio:\\xa0 I turn it up.\\n\\xa0\\nI am among the blessed:\\xa0 I drink wine by firelight, clothes rank with smoke,\\nBright silver twisted through my lobes.\\xa0 I know secrets;\\nThey are tattooed on my body where the sleeves can cover them,\\nThey read\\n\\xa0\\nBlessed, and only if we are lucky enough, you and I, courageous enough\\nTo shed our clothes together will you read them.\\xa0\\n\\xa0\\nSeeing scarlet leaves drift down,\\nPerhaps, with ice around the moon, or the steel bones of the oaks against Orion,\\nKnowing we a'