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Whether your loved one believed in science rather than God, or simply loved all things scientific, one of these poems might resonate. Listen back to the show here and check out the readings below.
The atom’s range by Reitza Dine Wirtshafer
Ice shivered me to shape
Heat into vapour.
I, one in the smoke’s twist,
In the icicle’s taper,
Diffused in the great hollow
Of love’s firmament,
Or narrowed to the fierce
Defying element -
I, that have great wonder
At the atom’s range,
Bow before the season’s
Ultimate of change.
The Dying Physicist Tells Her Why Goodbye Is Meaningless by Laurel Winter
I will see you later
and earlier and
over and over and
tomorrow and today and, yes,
I will see you yesterday.
Time and space,
they've proved to my satisfaction,
are nothing more than
mathematical abstraction so
I will see you then
and now
and somehow,
sweetheart,
much to your surprise,
I will see you
before and after
the first and last time
I ever see you,
so kiss me hello again
and don't cry.
Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn't Breaking by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
Antidotes to Fear of Death
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
The Sciences Sing a Lullabye by Albert Goldbarth
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you're tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.
Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren't alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren't alone. Go to sleep.
Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.
No Less BY Alice B. Fogel
It was twilight all day.
Sometimes the smallest things weigh us down,
small stones that we can't help
admiring and palming.
Look at the tiny way
this lighter vein got inside.
Look at the heavy gray dome of its sky.
This is no immutable world.
We know less than its atoms, rushing through.
Light, light. Light as air, to them,
for all we know. Trust me on this one,
there is happiness at stake.
Boulder, grain. Planet, dust:
What fills the stones fills us.
I remember, or I have a feeling,
I could be living somewhere with you,
weighted down the way we aren't now.
Often the greatest things,
those you'd think would be the heaviest,
are the very ones that float.
Science Mash Up – Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Albert Einstein, and others
Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is a tiny blue dot that we humans call home.
And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries.
We are constantly reminded that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is a prerequisite to survival.
Our little planet floats like a mote of dust in the morning sky.
All that you see, all that we can see, exploded out of a star billions of years ago, and the particles slowly arranged themselves into living things, including all of us.
We are made of star stuff.
We are the mechanism by which the universe can comprehend itself.
The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth.
We should remain grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
The sum of all our evolution, our thinking and our accomplishments is love.
How on earth can you explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as love?
Put your hand on a stove for a minute and it seems like an hour.
Sit with the person you love for an hour and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.
A marriage makes two fractional lives a whole.
It gives to two questioning natures a renewed reason for living.
It brings a new gladness to the sunshine, a new fragrance to the flowers, a new beauty to the earth, and a new mystery to life.
A Universe Of Atoms, An Atom In The Universe by Richard Feynman
There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison
Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.
Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the Sun
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.
Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.
Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.
Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.
Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the Universe.
Sonnet: Against Entropy by John M. Ford
The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days
Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke.
The universe winds down. That's how it's made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.
Elegy by Juniper Talbot
You,
whose body was born of stardust
13 billion years ago in the deep
darkness of space –
At that time hydrogen and helium were all –
You and I,
a distant dream
Nevertheless the universe
dreamed
the birth of stars
Carbon, oxygen and iron
cooked up in the furnace of stars
Until
Billions of years later they expanded, exploded
throwing their elements out in space,
like seeds on the cosmic wind –
seed clouds collapsing,
attraction and similarity
Second generation stars and planets –
And with that
Our lives began.
You made from stardust
And I –
A star had to be born –
Carbon, oxygen and iron
For us to exist,
And had to die for us to live.
Born of stars
We are
And to them we return.
Your star-bright radiance
Burned its bright candle
to the wick.
I see
You, the faint glimmer of radiance
Returning –
Carbon, oxygen, iron
To the star-bright center,
The luminous heart
where evolution
and the mystery and our destinies
Take us.
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