Poetry- Physics Entropy | 23 Apr 2009
A Responsibility to Awe
Rebbcca Elson was an astronomer. Her principal work focused on globular clusters, teasing out the history of stellar birth, life and death. She took her PhD at Cambridge and started publishing poems while working at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, and researched at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics.
I was born in the coldest hour of the night
At four in the morning in a blizzard
At the time of the year when the earth comes closest to
the sun
On the second day of the decade of free love
And walking on the moon.
-From Rebbcca Elson’s Journal,May 1997
Elson’s two poems for her collection ” A Responsibility to Awe“ being reproduced here..
We Astronomers
We astronomers are nomads, Merchants, circus people,
All the earth our tent.
We are industrious.
We breed enthusiasms,
Honour our responsibility to awe.
But the universe has moved a long way off.
Sometimes, I confess,
Starlight seems too sharp,
And like the moon
I bend my face to the ground,
To the small patch where each foot falls,
Before it falls,
And I forget to ask questions,
And only count things.
Carnal Knowledge
Having picked the final datum
From the universe
And fixed it in its column,
Named the causes of infinity,
Performed the calculus
Of the imaginary i, it seems
The body aches
To come too,
To the light,
Transmit the grace of gravity,
Express in its own algebra
The symmetries of awe and fear,
The shudder up the spine,
The knowing passing like a cool wind
That leaves the nape hairs leaping.
By -Rebecca Elson (1960 – 1999)
© Carcanet Press