Earth

This planet Earth that spins upon its axis,
hurtling through space, orbiting
like Rutherford's particulate electron,
the nucleus of its Sun;
Inhabiting a space in Space as minute
in the scale of the universe as the atom is
to Man, who feels his planet as enormous.

Its spin casts me now into light, now shade
which I call night and day, and hurry with my
tasks to fit them to its rhythm.

The tilt of my Earth's axis teases me,
now nearer, now farther from the sun that warms my feet.

Outside, a man cuts back his hedge
the houses seem so solid, big.
But to a higher eye would be invisible,
carved grains of sand,
Bentine-esque artifacts upon a tray of earth.