Fractals: Speaking Images of Christmas

“Look at something for a long time
and find something dramatically new.”
                                -Benoit Mandelbrot

Tree.
Symmetry speaks in never-
ending patterns,
teaching branches to spread
upward, reach for sky and sun
from roots drilled
wide and deep,
both above and beneath
voicing a template of what
humans may become.

Fern.
Voiced awe
of tiny off-shoots
that splay out
to enunciate
the fuller fronds’
complexity, order
and beauty of repetition
conversed in the chaos
of conformity.

Feather.
Freedom of flight
whispered in hollow
shafts and contoured
vanes that replicate
themselves in smaller
and smaller barbs and hooks,
asserting feathers within feathers,
modeling, pronouncing
the mystery of life itself.

Our very lungs.
Bronchial tubes ramified
like profusions of fingers,
fractals expressing
the thumbprint of God,
sounding the human wonder
of Incarnation—
Christ born as we are
so that we may become
as He is.

Anita Tanner finds reading and writing akin to breathing. She was raised on a small dairy farm in Star Valley, Wyoming, where she learned a love of the land, hard work, the thrill of planting and harvest, and the love and power of metaphor. A book of her poetry, Where Fields Have Been Planted, was published in 1999. To her, words matter, and finding the right ones is an ongoing quest.

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