From the petroglyphs to the cineplex,
In darkened halls, on cavern walls,
Apollo’s rays
Fall strange and beautiful.
The world behind our sleeping eyes
Is brought to life through waking eyes,
The weighty world of dreams
That dreams about our world
And yet is not our world, but more.

It’s captured in the camera
Or carved out on the caveman’s rock,
And made to move and speak and sing
By some divine illumination,
Free from logic’s elucidation,
Yet seen and heard and felt and drunk
Simply all the same.

The images on the curtain screen,
The figures on the solemn stone
Remind a man he is himself,
And not himself but someone else.
There’s more to man than blood and bone.

And so we sit and watch agape
At shadows dancing mythical,
At shadows sprung not from the sun,
Nor yet an artificial one,
But the psychic light of poesy,
Reflecting always Beauty,
Beauty the goddess the Muses worship,
And trembling mortals would dare behold.