Do-it-yourself grook

 Go on a starlit night,
  stand on your head,
 leave your feet dangling
  outwards into space,
 and let the starry
  firmament you tread
 be, for the moment,
  your elected base.

 Feel Earth's colossal weight
  of ice and granite,
 of molten magma,
  water, iron, and lead;
 and briefly hold
  this strangely solid planet
 balanced upon
  your strangely solid head.

Today’s grook is rather atypical, in that it is not particularly epigrammatic, pithy or aphoristic. However, it does share in the other main quality that most of the grooks possess - it reveals Hein’s delightfully quirky sense of play, to say nothing of his keen perception and his occasional trick of deftly turning established ideas on their heads.

The paradigm shift is handled beautifully - from the initial ‘leave your feet dangling outwards into space’ to the wonderful image in the last four lines, I can not just visualise but almost feel what he means. Definitely one of my favourite grooks, despite its unconventional nature.

Links

We’ve run one other grook: poem #668

The comments to which also contain a biography
http://www.powerweb.net/playandlive/piethein.htm

and a bunch of other links.

— Martin