When it comes to relationships with poetry, at school, I had a preference for the sassy bravado of Tam O’Shanter, courtesy of Robert Burns, rather than English words worth of wooing and woe-ing. Later, I discovered the deceptively simple enchantments of Poet Laureat Norman MacCaig, yet another Scottish poet.
Having one of my own poems held within The Scottish Poetry Library (alongside these masters), is an uncanny honour, and celebration is appropriately timed for World Poetry Day!
Being included in the anthology, POINTS OF INTERSECTION: SCIENCE AND POETRY, is one of the many rewards resulting from a 4-week course, conducted by Professor Sam Illingworth at Edinburgh Napier University last October. Participants appraised each other’s work, undeniably proving poetry and science really can belong together.
Norazha’s “We Only See the Dead” makes my head spin, every time I read it. The complexities of time and space are given to us full blast (a bit like a rollicking adventure with Tam O’Shanter). Courtney’s “Northern Lights” is contrastingly peaceful and a little bewitching (which is more of a Norman MacCaig craft). I simply planted some “Sturdy Mulga Trees” in The Scottish Library. I wonder if anyone will notice them or appreciate their amazing Australian significance?
We Only See the Dead by Norazha Paiman
Andromeda’s light takes 2.537 million years to reach us, which means the photons hitting your retina tonight left when Australopithecus was learning to walk upright. You’re not seeing Andromeda. You’re seeing its ghost from the Pliocene, and it’s probably already collided with us by now, in real-time, in the present we’ll never know.
Betelgeuse sits 548 light-years away in Orion’s shoulder, already exploded maybe, already supernova, the shockwave expanding while we’re still looking at a star from 1476—before Columbus, before the printing press—when the light from its death finally arrives we’ll call it “breaking news” like we witnessed it.
Even Proxima Centauri is 4.24 light-years off. Obama’s first term is just arriving there now, and if they’re looking back they’re seeing us in 2016, still innocent, still thinking certain things won’t happen, and neither of us can warn the other because causality moves at the speed limit and we’re all shouting into the past.
We won’t see it. We won’t witness it. Everything you see is obituary, every star a time capsule you can’t open until it’s irrelevant, and the farther you look the deeper into graveyard you go.
Look up: that’s not the sky. That’s a time-lapse of extinction we call beautiful because we don’t know what we’re really seeing.
We only see the dead. We see only the dead. The dead, only the dead.
Northern Lights by Courtney Williams
An Icelandic car park, 1 AM.
Shaking screens capture particles
as they sweep across the sky.
Spellbound by solar ghosts.
All too soon it ends,
leaving us cold,
weary, but
starry
eyed.
These Sturdy Mulga Trees will feature as part of this year’s Science Rhymes / National Science Week call for poems on the theme SEEDS TO SCENERY.
Wishing you an enchanting WORLD POETRY DAY on 21st March!
Celia