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# The Naked Eye
- URL: https://www.andyposner.org/the-naked-eye/
- Published: 2023-11-12T17:10:17.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-15T05:02:53.000Z
- Description: Both the atheist and the believer have it wrong. We are not mere bodies, nor do we have souls. Heaven would be a room strewn with books and nary an errand to distract from reading;
- Author: Andy
- Tags: Be The Change, poetry, #Migrated-1784090317409, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-07-15 04:39

Both the atheist and the believer have it wrong.  
We are not mere bodies, nor do we have souls.  
Heaven would be a room strewn with books  
and nary an errand to distract from reading;  
what more could I want from an afterlife than  
more of this life, stripped to its essential joy?  
And death would come, not when the electric  
hum that throbs between my ears falls silent,  
but when that elixir which, if mixed just right,  
forms a memory in mankind, dissolves like  
a helium balloon floating into nothingness.

For all our poetry, our atrocities and good deeds,  
the atoms that make us could just as well have  
made a rock, a worm, a body of water. We are  
not so special, you and I, though we have loved  
and murdered one another, save for this:  
on a Sunday morning I awake to a riot of birds  
singing, neighbors walking their dogs, pastors  
and poets crafting their bromides and half-truths,  
and hope, if not pray, my son will grow to see  
how beautiful the world is to the naked eye.