Dvora Levin

Once having been a Director for Social Change Projects in Victoria and Israel, Dvora Levin now devotes herself to poetry. She has published four collections of her own work: To Bite The Blue Apple, Sharav, Ragged Light (published by Ekstasis Editions) and a unique hand-bound book, Zeroing In On Nothing. Dvora also edited two poetry collections written by the homeless, sex workers and addicts in recovery: Voices From The Edge (Ekstasis Editions) and Victoria On The Banks Of The Mainstream (funded by the City). She continues to lead weekly poetry writing sessions with federal parolees living in a halfway house.

Twinning

Like identical twins who share DNA,
science and religion peer into the void,
scribbling their separate creation stories.

Science begins with a primordial fireball,
a critical density bursting into gravity,
sliding along the curvature of spacetime.

For religion, it’s a deity consciously creating
a perfectly tuned universe, teeter-tottering
between subject and object, faith in the all powerful One.

Based on vacuum fluctuations, the uncertainty principle,
some cosmologists suggest the universe could have arisen
from nothing, spontaneously.

Yet, what if the deity is not a fixed presence
but that wily, unpredictable spontaneity itself,
delighting in watching her twins, science and religion,
playing tennis with that fuzzy free-choice ball?

Holding

The centre is everywhere.
The circumference, nowhere in sight.
Everything radiating from the centre
of the unknowable.

My attention, a flutter-stop
stuttering on the surface, reaching out,
searching for something, anything
proven I can lean upon.

When I surrender my holding on,
let my fantasies, my memories
of life’s catastrophes evaporate,
I touch centre.

A dynamic stillness settles me.
All those facts and theories, fractals and DNA,
the immensity of the ineffable,
everything spiraling.

This is not a grasping faith,
a careful research study,
nor a prescribed path but
a stumbling into the unity,

an exponential expansion into
a fragile certainty, a brief escape
from the force of gravity
always pulling us apart;

to arrive at the centre of the maze
we are forced to inhabit throughout our lives.
The gift – to briefly know the unknowable
that knows itself perfectly;

before that inevitable return
to wobble about the circumference
desperately holding on,
just holding on.

Story Telling

So many faith stories torn and shredded
by facts, measurements, new discoveries,
as scientists create their own archipelago of stories,
their sacred texts and commentaries all peer-reviewed,
free of morality, unburdened by consequence.

Some scientists are declared atheists, dismissing
rabbis, priests, country vicars at church bazaars,
while others are agnostics, tapping their toes
at the sidelines, ready to jump either way.

Monks and mystics now are forced to hide out in their caves
sifting through the rubble of fact earthquakes,
picking up and polishing pulsing shards of belief,
putting them on display in case a scientist or two should wander by.

Fact-finders who dare to enter the arched dome,
to sit with the silence, will feel
their pulse quicken, will feel
the embrace of the ineffable.

From Shared Motion: Science and Spirituality
by Dvora Levin
© 2018 Dvora Levin
Published by Ekstasis Editions