A Responsibility to Awe

But on the whole, understanding the Universe seems a fundamental step in understanding our origins, and in establishing a sense of perspective with respect to space and time that I find comforting. Someone once said to me ‘astronomy is like a big circus tent – there’s room for everyone.’ I feel privileged indeed to be able to spend my days inside a tent with such a dazzling roof.

Impatient to say all these greens
Before the flowers begin to chatter,

Is there ever a time you’re ready
To lay it down
To stop all the singing and dancing
To pass into what?

Transumanza
Always moving towards the easy place
The green grass

To tell everyone before you go
What life was like when you were young
What the universe is like out there
What is dark matter?
Forced to acknowledge that what we see is only
A tiny fraction of what is there

19 February
After a lecture on superstring theory
How language & sculpture interact in the mind
Dimensions curl up
Is there anything special about a string?
So that illuminating it
From another angle
You see projected on the wall a fox
And then a tree
And then a bird
And you know it’s all one thing
But you don’t know it’s a hand
And has four fingers & a thumb
And knuckles that bend
All particles are waves in the field
We are only seeing things from different points of view
In certain limits a theory metamorphoses
Into another, and another
Space curving in on itself
What is a field?
...

Not to let the years go by unaccounted for, unnumbered
Not just here under the Universe
But in it, growing out of it
And you for whom the stars are not always out
For whom the daily chores eclipse the universe itself
Never to lose the poetry that runs through things

Meeting respectfully the other blue of the sea
A fringe of little rippling waves, then honey sand
With its display of shells & sticks & lost things
And me, still here, still present in this world.

We carry what comforts and sustains
Which can be space itself & time

If an air bubble breaks the surface, sends out ripples
Then dark matter is the passing fish