Light is a phenomenon analyzed by science, celebrated in literature, and symbolized by religions. Light and nature in all these aspects form the source of meaning in these poems. The sublime reality that encompasses the spectacularly grandiose as well as the common can be realized through the beauty of life's interconnected web. But questions that struggle with the relationship between human responsibility and survival have never been more prominent than now. Human understanding has never been so close to nature and never more destructive and exploitive of it. Human cultures have focused on human meaning in building civilizations, but survival seems now to require a more fundamental existential awareness of the totality of life.