“…Mind arranged all things, including this rotation that the stars and the sun and the moon and the lower air and the ether now undergo as they are separated off.”

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, fr. 476 KRS (=Simplicius, in Phys. 164,24 and 156,13)

He had it all wrong.
Not just wrong, but flipped,
As a film negative is flipped.
There’s no Tornado of Mind
To set things whirling:
We reside, instead, all
Of us, in a Tornado of
Un-Mind.
Whatever’s sure, whatever’s
Rooted deeply in wet earth,
Is flung madly outward
To the forsaken edges.
It clumps together, hanging.
Farther in is air, which keeps us
Gaspingly alive; while
At the center’s center,
Most rapacious of things that are,
Is fire.
Knowing this, however dimly,
We stretch our hands by night
To the cool damp black,
Dreaming of refuge
From our own burning viscera –
And are thwarted,
Time upon time: shackled
To the furnace through
Cruel necessity and the inscrutable
Workings of Un-Mind.

Write this in your book, Ionian.
Read it in the public square.
No one will listen. I promise
You that.
Even now they do not listen.
They heap the slain as kindling,
And the fire grows.