Teleportation

by Wang Ping

In Greek, tele means remote, and port is a harbor to transport,
send, carry, bear or deliver matter from A to B, for example,
to teleport man from earth to moon, without breaking apart.
Newton’s faithful shout: it’s ridiculous, anti-gravity, anti-physics!
Quantum believers say it has nothing to do with the physical.
It transports only a state, a code of the man, his mind, thought . . .
one particle at a time, from A to B.  If true, is love
a state of mind?  If not, what code does it deliver as it travels
thousands of miles?  Why does it produce such fragrance,
such fiery display?  And the heart — Is it a matter or code,
with its blood, muscles, veins and all the strings attached to
another ether?  How does it move stars and universe without lifting a finger? What about fear, anger, hatred . . . magnified to destroy?  And kindness, what about kindness, and her child named Joy — Grown, harvested and teleported by poets, through pain and sorrow Through persistent dreams?  What about dreams, the darkly port Where we fly, fight and cry, bodiless, screaming to get out
Or pray to stay in?  Do you call it real, or just a code —
A dream that the world can’t live without?
What’s the code in the prayer from a hungry child to God,
Alone at night, on her knees?  We do not need to know
What’s in her prayer, or in the package, says the quantum
physicist, just the way Amazon delivers Santa’s gifts
from heaven to earth.  The postman doesn’t know, must not know
what’s inside, yet children squeal with delight upon its arrival.
And oh, declares the scientist, nobody can peek or scan into the box
because observation changes its original state.  Thus when A is
teleported to B, C will arrive, forever as mystical original.
Holy C, this teleportation matter feels more like poetry now —
its process, its light and weight, its quantum leaps between
A & B, its manner of delivery in the speed of light,
its use of code to teleport our birthright — Hope —
that no force can copy, change or take away.
I’m no quantum physicist, just a self-claimed poet.
But I know, I feel for certain,

When my heart is scanned a million times with your lies
When my name and body is tasered with your hypocrisy
It still teleports the same code — Love — to 7.8 billion hearts
50 pulses a minute, 1.5 billion beats for each life and
the infinite particles that make a heart a heart
Uncertain, but always in its original state