Of Restless Wonder – Nicholas Yandell

“Do you ever feel restless?”
Asked the worker of a drone.

“Long to live beyond the structures
The hexagons of honeycombs?

Ever feel we’re something more
Than antenna twitches
And wing flicks
And buzzing bands of yellow
In vast washes of green
Under distant blankets of blue?

Away from the queen
Apart from the hive
Beyond existing,
To simply survive?

Give into the urge
Disengage our tracks
Stray far from the path
And head for the horizon?”

This wisp of a quandary
Tossed out casually
By some quiet voices
Going unnoticed
Say for one small set of ears:

A passing goat who feels
Without fully comprehending
That they’ve never been alone
In their quest to know:

What’s beyond the fences?

The long golden sheets
Spanning squinted-eye reach

The high mounds
Brushing against the clouds
The distant color explosions
And transitional motion
Of a glowing globe
Ascending the highest trees
Illuminating borders
And realms of their keepers:

Whose modest life is sketched out
Growing seeds
Tending an apiary
And watching the goats at play.

While dreaming of other lands
And faraway adventures
Of a world unknown.

The deep seas and winding rivers
Towering mountaintops and desert expanses
By automobiles and railroad cars
Airplanes and ocean liners
And that of the slick-suited travelers
Boarding massive shiny rockets
And blasting off skyward…

Those starry-eyed gravity defiers
Thrusting metal through the atmosphere
Longing to merge with specks of light
Satiating that need to go
Past the bounds
Of an earthly home
Thriving
In the warmth
Of speculation:

Like all the great explorers
Even those within the mind
Wandering the limits
Embracing imagination
Contemplating consciousness
And in what state
Or what place
Dwells life and reality.

Spiraling questions
Musings of possibilities
Spun with theories of frequencies
And desire for the ability
To commune with nature
With all the plants and animals

Even insects…

Like that little bee:

To fathom the secrets they keep

In the spans of their being

And what they too ponder

When casting out their wonder.



Nicholas Yandell is a composer, who sometimes creates with words instead of sound. In those cases, he usually ends up with fiction and occasionally poetry. He also paints and draws, and often all these activities become combined, because they’re really not all that different from each other, and it’s all just art right?
When not working on creative projects, Nick works as a bookseller at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, where he enjoys being surrounded by a wealth of knowledge, as well as working and interacting with creatively stimulating people. He has a website where he displays his creations; it’s nicholasyandell.com. Check it out!

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