The Mind's a Dusty Chalkboard

Something different this time--a piece from about 20 years ago:

The mind’s a dusty chalkboard on which the’logians write

They stand before, pushing and smudging chalkdust to the sides

And taking the chalk they leave their thoughts

Splitting atoms of doctrine more finely than what was done before

And writing on, their chalk grips the slate stronger more and more

The chalkdust enters the air cloying the tender nostrils

Of those whose fate it is to stare at the figures writing and to decipher

The minute logic and philosophic upon that great gray board.

The mind’s a dusty chalkboard on which the’logians write

To die unknown ‘tis their central fright

Their voice unheard by their generation and peers

So they think they have to say something new--never heard before

Thus they smudge the chalk of their betters’ labors

To write new dogma more stranger and stranger

Till their immortal souls have come into the danger

Of the eternal fire for many are the souls who go astray

From reading as the the’logians write away.

The mind’s a dusty chalkboard on which the’logians write

They seek philosophy and astronomy, psychology and biology

To wrap as their theology

Never realizing that Revelation is not found in human thought

Nor ideas, nor systems, nor in debates fought

Revelation is not upon that dusty chalkboard captured

How does one write for the eyes to see

What the Word is sounding for ears to hear without recourse

To the old gray slate.

Do little flecks of calcium multiplied upon thousands

And millions and billions once wrote by the Hand of God

In carbon make sense when human flesh endlessly rearranges them?

Yet, still, the mind’s a dusty chalkboard on which the’logians write.