James Lovelock, Gaian

on his birthday

All is motion. Here is a mind in play
with the spinning wheels of change, and light, and knowledge.
Inventor and engineer, with a new coinage –
the novacene – your latest book can say
where life has been, its rise – and see the way
for it to take, its future shape and lineage.
With what deep sense – as with what grace and courage –
you walk the Earth at a hundred years today.

Listen to him, you beetling mass of minds,
rock-solid-landlocked in the deathly pause
of linear thought. Here is a voice that finds
a path of light in intuition’s cause.

Here is a man set free, whom nothing bars
to walk the Earth and meditate the stars.