meditation on a microscope

Alex Beukers

But everything exposed by the light becomes visible—and everything that is illuminated becomes a light. (Eph 5:13 NIV)

Knowledge, they said, would begin

with the butterfly wing

which rested on the glass

as if for just a moment.

.

The bulb translates

the wing into a stain.

By laws of magnification

it defeats doubt in

an instant, guiding

the light upwards from

the mirror, and stretching

beams out, to project

.

a new image in the ocular,

big enough for me to see:

coarse plains

with great

chasms in

between. Blemishes,

once unremarked

by human eyes,

are thrown into sharp relief.

.

I tune it by

thumbing it clumsily into clarity.

I know I have no bearing on the light:

the dance of angles

accomplishes without me.

For whether I am ‘eye’ or not,

physics works within, invisibly.

.

But then I looked again

and saw that the wing,

now finely focused,

is a vision of beauty—

crystalline scales

sheathed like armour

and braced with lightning.

.

It’s a far cry

from the loneliness

of that dead sample on its slide.

.

What had I learned from it,

This transformation? It stemmed

not from knowledge,

but from the union

.

of divine insight

and our perception,

and He made it—

so that a broken specimen

could be made whole again.

And perhaps this is the reason why

.

later, in my mind’s eye,

I saw that butterfly rise—

.

stirring with an inner light,

changed,

revitalised.

.

Alex Beukers is a third year English student at Merton. She enjoys tennis, exploring old buildings, and more recently, music by the Grateful Dead. Besides learning to cook things other than variations on pasta with pesto, there is still much she wants to do over the remainder of her time at Oxford.