Moral absolutism
Is dashed on the rocks
Of cultural relativism
By winds of ethnocentrism.
In the air-conditioned
Clinical room,
The scientist positioned,
A housefly
Under a lens that envisioned,
Its eyes like diamond blooms.
How like a god
He sets to make incisions,
To go behind the eyes,
Into the mystery beyond the visions
Of the tribal prophets
Beneath their desert starry skies.
But the fly has far more eyes,
And will see in more directions,
Than any man who walks the earth,
Its thousand-eyed reflections
Pierced in tribal songs
Of the world before man’s birth.
