Science poetry-or verse that is just informative about nature

[ViewsofMars]

Two absolutely great poems.

Stream Of Life
by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the Earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was a Bengali poet, philosopher, artist, playwright, composer and novelist. India's first Nobel laureate, Tagore won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature. He composed the text of both India's and Bangladesh's respective national anthems. Tagore traveled widely and was friends with many notable 20th century figures such as William Butler Yeats, H.G. Wells, Ezra Pound, and Albert Einstein. While he supported Indian Independence, he often had tactical disagreements with Gandhi (at one point talking him out of a fast to the death). His body of literature is deeply sympathetic for the poor and upholds universal humanistic values. His poetry drew from traditional Vaisnava folk lyrics and was often deeply mystical.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/tagore/

and

For the Anniversary of My Death
by W. S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what.
###

 

[ViewsofMars]

October (section I)
by Louise Glück


Is it winter again, is it cold again,
didn't Frank just slip on the ice,
didn't he heal, weren't the spring seeds planted

didn't the night end,
didn't the melting ice
flood the narrow gutters

wasn't my body
rescued, wasn't it safe

didn't the scar form, invisible
above the injury

terror and cold,
didn't they just end, wasn't the back garden
harrowed and planted--

I remember how the Earth felt, red and dense,
in stiff rows, weren't the seeds planted,
didn't vines climb the south wall

I can't hear your voice
for the wind's cries, whistling over the bare ground

I no longer care
what sound it makes

when was I silenced, when did it first seem
pointless to describe that sound

what it sounds like can't change what it is--

didn't the night end, wasn't the earth
safe when it was planted

didn't we plant the seeds,
weren't we necessary to the earth,

the vines, were they harvested?
###

 

[marcus]

Imagine there's no Heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

...
...

Tomorrow (9 oct) is J.L.'s birthday. Google pulled a nice logo in his honor. He would have been 70.

 

[ViewsofMars]

Published in Atlantic Monthly - 2010
By the Sea
by Maura Stanton

The spears on the plain of Troy
Glittered like things that hadn’t been invented—

Holiday tinsel, bristling antennas,
A cabinet of needles at the flu clinic—

And the sea was closer, only two miles away,
Gleaming like a strip of blue gel toothpaste.

That’s when a grasshopper, the size of a stapler,
Or perhaps a computer mouse, or a brick

Of cheddar cheese in your refrigerator,
Jumped from a crack outside the walled citadel,

Scaring a mother as she pressed the tip
Of a fibula through the cloth of her son’s tunic.

The fibula looked like a big, crude safety pin—
There are lots in museums, including hers,

For she dropped it into dry grass, and later on
Warriors trampled it into the clay clods

Of her fertile land, their shrieks and thrusts
As they stabbed her boy, dragged her by the hair,

Untelevised, but still remembered
By those who listened and then repeated

And repeated the same stories over and over
In hoarse voices, on clay tablets, in type, in pixels.
###

 

[dx]

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.

 

[ViewsofMars]

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.

Brilliant! "Perfection" dx, thank you. Richard Feynman:!) When a poem is that great I say, "Cracking the egg!" Beautiful is each day that unfolds. And so it is for me. Again, a warm thank you for inspiring me to work on a new poem .

Bye the way, Charles Darwin's great-great-granddaughter, Ruth Padel (1), has written some poetry I like. Here is a recent poem from 'Darwin - A Life in Poems" by Ruth Padel.

Charles Darwin walks in tropical vegetation for the first time, aged 22

LIKE GIVING TO A BLIND MAN EYES

He’s standing in Elysium. Palm feathers, a green
dream of fountain against blue sky. Banana fronds,
slack rubber rivulets, a canopy of waterproof tearstain
over his head. Pods and racemes of tamarind.
Follicle, pinnacle; whorl, bole and thorn.

“I expected a good deal. I had read Humboldt
and was afraid of disappointment.”
What if he’d stayed at home? “How utterly vain
such fear is, none can tell but those who have seen
what I have today.” A small rock off Africa –

alone with his enchantment. So much and so unknown.
“Not only the grace of forms
and rich new colours: it’s the numberless –
& confusing – associations rushing on the mind
that produce the effect.” He walks through hot damp air

and tastes it like the breath of earth; like blood.
He is possessed by chlorophyll. By the calls of unknown birds.
He wades into sea and scares an octopus. It puffs black hair
at him, turns red – as hyacinth – and darts for cover.
He sees it watching. He’s discovered

something wonderful! He tests it against coloured card
and the sailors laugh. They know that girly blush!
He feels a fool – but look, he’s touched Volcanic rock
for the first time. And Coral on its native stone.
“Often at Edinburgh have I gazed at little pools

of water left by tide. From tiny Corals of our shores
I pictured larger ones. Little did I know how exquisite,
still less expect my hope of seeing them to come true.
Never, in my wildest castles of the air, did I imagine this.”
Lava must once have streamed over the sea-floor here,

baking shells to white hard rock. Then a subterranean force
pushed everything up to make an island. His first evidence
of Volcano! Vegetation he’s never seen, every step a new surprise.
“New insects, fluttering about still newer flowers. It has been
for me a glorious day, like giving to a blind man eyes.” (2)

1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7231/full/457794a.html
2. http://www.ruthpadel.com/pages/mother_of_pearl.htm[/URL]

 

[makoto5]

Here's one dealing with chemistry. It is from "Bushido: The Virtues of Rei and Makoto" (A. J. Stewart, 2005).

LAW OF CHEMISTRY

A black shank of hair hangs over his face
holding his anger in.
His glasses
are pushed low on his nose
letting his irritation out.

Frustration boils. Molecules want to
steam out at non-standard volume,
pressure, Mr. Damn
Avagadro can take his dumb gas laws
or not, who the hell cares?

I try again. It is
all in dynamic balance,
the pressure, the volume,
the CD is too much for me

I say squeeze to increase pressure
and of course volume gets
turned down, add heat
molecules jiggle faster and
anger happens and if
pressure is constant the
volume goes up. More heat,
more volume, or
more pressure
the damn rap is too loud

I react. First:

work it out
to standard temperature and pressure.
Cool, to correct for
differences, then go
from volume to moles,
from moles to molecules.

Just

think like a molecule, I waggle my fingers.

His eyes smoke.
They are beautiful but he will not
let himself work past his anger.


Stewart also has a more recent book of science-flavored poems ("Circle, Turtle, Ashes"; 2010), but most of these deal with limnology, not so much chemistry or physics.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

I’ve mentioned Erasmus Darwin’s poetry a couple of times in other threads, so thought I’d add to this thread.

“Darwin's final long poem, The Temple of Nature, was published posthumously in 1803. The poem was originally titled The Origin of Society. It is considered his best poetic work. It centres on his own conception of evolution. The poem traces the progression of life from micro-organisms to civilized society.” - wiki

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=...&resnum=2&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

[marcus]

MATH LOVE SONG ON YOUTUBE


His every other word has a special meaning in mathspeak.
The song will surely win the girl's heart if she is a math grad student.

 

[atyy]

Two absolutely great poems.

Stream Of Life
by Rabindranath Tagore

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.

It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the Earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.

It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.

I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.
And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

 

[marcus]

Enjoyed the Matt Harding youtube.
Did you happen to catch the name of the song, in the credits?
I wasn't sure what language it was if it was an actual language, maybe Brazilian Portuguese?

 

[fuzzyfelt]

"He also wrote the song "Praan" for Matt Harding's "Dancing 2008" viral video, which earned him the "Best Music Video" award at the Hollywood Music Awards.[10]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garry_Schyman

If maths is included, Queneau and Roubaud, or Oulipo generally might interest, although less about nature, e.g.

http://moviesofmyself.typepad.com/home/2009/06/queneau.html

http://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com/2010/03/queneau-and-oulipo.html

http://uprightdown.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/roubaudwasthetime3.mp4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Roubaud

 

[marcus]

Thanks fuzzyfelt.

I see at last! The song background for Matt Harding's dance montage is a poem by the famous poet Rabindrath Tagore "Gitanjali" or "Stream of Life" written in the Bengali language (also called Bangla) which is spoken in Bangladesh and some other parts of South Asia. And it was set to music by Shyman.

Personally I very much like a song performed by Pete Seeger and the Weavers which has the refrain "There is only one river, there is only one sea. And it flow through you. And it flows through me.

We are all one people, we are one and the same. We are all one spirit, we are all one name..."

I was able to find the lyrics to this on the web, but I could not find a youtube or any kind of audio freely available. Does anyone know of audio for that song?

It is somewhat similar in theme to the Rabindrath Tagore. But more humanity-centered and not so much universal life-centered.

 

[gendou2]

Here's one I wrote in 2009:

View Before Reading!

Hubble Deep Field

Little smudge here in the bottom left corner
A whole galaxy of suns and worlds and life!
A pea in the bowl of soup 93 billion light-years across

Seen here so young, new stars forming in frothy clumps
But that's all gone now, civilizations dead for 13 billion years
Their final cry; just a cupful of photons

9 million pixels are more than my heart can bare
How can it be only one thirteen-millionth of the sky?

Look but don't touch, a sky full of ghosts
Not but to weep for the loneliness of it

 

[Roysun]

The universe is an infinite amount of moments within one moment
The universe is an existence within an infinite amount of existences
Each moment is a different existence
The present is when time stops, the past no longer exists and the future has yet to exist and is constantly there

 

[fuzzyfelt]

Thanks fuzzyfelt.

I see at last! The song background for Matt Harding's dance montage is a poem by the famous poet Rabindrath Tagore "Gitanjali" or "Stream of Life" written in the Bengali language (also called Bangla) which is spoken in Bangladesh and some other parts of South Asia. And it was set to music by Shyman.

Personally I very much like a song performed by Pete Seeger and the Weavers which has the refrain "There is only one river, there is only one sea. And it flow through you. And it flows through me.

We are all one people, we are one and the same. We are all one spirit, we are all one name..."

I was able to find the lyrics to this on the web, but I could not find a youtube or any kind of audio freely available. Does anyone know of audio for that song?

It is somewhat similar in theme to the Rabindrath Tagore. But more humanity-centered and not so much universal life-centered.

Pleasure. Sorry I didn't look further, it is very nice. I don't mean to keep following you, but I think I've heard the song sung by Peter, Paul and Mary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrTGgpWmdZQ&feature=related
http://www.we7.com/#/artist/Peter-Yarrow/music/tracks

 

[marcus]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrTGgpWmdZQ&feature=related
...

Thanks, that's the song.
It seems to have been written by Peter Yarrow (of PP&M) and besides the free online version that you found there is one to buy from Itunes which is performed by the Weavers (maybe at Carnegie Hall, I'm not sure.)

What I'd really like would be a performance of the song by a chorus of Aliens from various different galaxies---perhaps in several languages. Do Aliens sing?
More to the point, do they sing close barbershop harmony? Let's ask Gendou2, as a poet he is supposed to know these things
Or perhaps you know, fuzzyfelt?

 

[fuzzyfelt]

What I'd really like would be a performance of the song by a chorus of Aliens from various different galaxies---perhaps in several languages. Do Aliens sing?
More to the point, do they sing close barbershop harmony? Let's ask Gendou2, as a poet he is supposed to know these things
Or perhaps you know, fuzzyfelt?

 

[marcus]

Good, I take it then that the answer is yes, they do sing.
And very likely over a wide portion of the universe they are singing Peter Yarrow's song
"we are all one people, we are one and the same, we are all one spirit, we are all one name!"

Yes, the green ones with tentacles too. It's quite clear now. Thanks for your reply.

 

[fuzzyfelt]

At least, I don't know that that isn't the case, but I'm afaid I'm not able to contribute much further, apart from thinking it a nice thought!

 

[Roysun]

excuse me but can anyone explain to me how to make a thread within this site? how do i make my own forum?

 

[marcus]

excuse me but can anyone explain to me how to make a thread within this site? how do i make my own forum?

You don't make your own forum, you CHOOSE the forum you want to start your thread in.

Go here:
https://www.physicsforums.com/index.php

You will see a list of forums, underlined links, like quantum physics or engineering or social sciences or general discussion

Choose a forum by clicking on it.

Then you will see the list of threads in that forum. At the top of the list you will see a button labeled "new topic". Press that button.

Then you will be asked to type the TITLE of your new topic thread, and the first post, that will begin the thread. Then under the text box where you type your post, you will see the "submit" button.

 

[Roysun]

You don't make your own forum, you CHOOSE the forum you want to start your thread in.

Go here:
https://www.physicsforums.com/index.php

You will see a list of forums, underlined links, like quantum physics or engineering or social sciences or general discussion

Choose a forum by clicking on it.

Then you will see the list of threads in that forum. At the top of the list you will see a button labeled "new topic". Press that button.

Then you will be asked to type the TITLE of your new topic thread, and the first post, that will begin the thread. Then under the text box where you type your post, you will see the "submit" button.

thank you i appreciate the help

 

[MrQuarky]

The Creation Poem by Richard A. Muller

At first there is nothing
no earth, no sun
no space, no time
nothing

Time begins
and the vacuum explodes, erupts
from nothing, filled with fire
everywhere
furiously hot and bright

Fast as light, space grows,
and the firestorm grows
weaker. Crystals appear
droplets
of the very first matter. Strange matter
fragile bits
a billionth of the universe
overwhelmed in turbulence
of no importance
they seem
as they wait
for the violence to subside

The universe cools and the crystals shatter
and shatter again,
and again and again
until they can shatter no more. Fragments
electrons, gluons, quarks,
grasp at each other, but are burned back apart
by the blue-white heat, still far too hot
for atoms to endure

Space grows, and the fire diminishes
to white to red to infrared
to darkness.
A million year holocaust has passed.
Particles huddle in the cold and bind themselves
into atoms -- hydrogen, helium, simple atoms
from which all else is made.

Drawn by gravity, the atoms gather
and divide
and form clouds of all sizes
stars and galaxies
of stars, clusters of galaxies. In the voids
there is empty space
for the first time.

In a small star cloud, a clump of cool matter
compresses and heats
and ignites
and once again there is light.

Deep within a star, nuclei
are fuel and food, burning and cooking
for billions of years, fusing
to carbon and oxygen and iron, matter of life
and intelligence, born slowly, buried
trapped
deep within a star

Burned and burdened, a giant star’s heart
collapses. Convulses. A flash. In seconds
energy from gravity, thrown out
overheats, explodes, ejects
the shell of the star. Supernova! Growing brighter
than a thousand stars. Still brighter, brighter
than a million stars, a billion stars, brighter
than a galaxy of stars. Cinders of carbon, oxygen, iron
expelled into space
escape
free! They cool and harden
to dust, the ashes of a star
the substance of life

In Milky Way galaxy at the edge of Virgo Cluster
(named five billion years later, for a mother),
the dust divides and gathers and begins to form
a new star. Nearby a smudge of dust begins to form
a planet. The young sun
compresses, and heats
and ignites
and warms the infant earth

 

[marcus]

As I recall, Richard A Muller is author of a textbook Physics for Future Presidents. I've heard him lecture at UC Berkeley, where he is one of the phys. profs. I had never seen any of his science poetry. (Same person?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Muller

 

[MrQuarky]

Yeah that's the guy. He reads it to the class in the last lecture and everybody claps. It may also be included in his book and I think its the only poem he's written.

 

[Roysun]

how does the the beginning of time and space create an explosion?

 

[marcus]

how does the the beginning of time and space create an explosion?

It's a poem, Roy. Scientific understanding of a certain era (2006) mythologized in a rather beautiful way--turned into a story.

Here's a YouTube from 2007 where he introduces the poem with a frank prosaic account where he says "maybe time began maybe it didnt, maybe space began maybe it didn't, we don't know..." and acknowledges various areas of uncertainty. That is the scientist talking, not the poet.

Then after 4 or 5 minutes of a factual unpoetical account (allowing for doubt and qualifiation) he introduces his poem as "a scientist's myth" and reads it to the students.

The pictures that sciences give us are always subject to being falsified by observation, corrected and improved. The degree of consensus can fluctuate: at times more controversy and division, at other times more agreement. A poem is like a crystal--once made, it does not change.

Today the "big bang" is being imagined and modeled differently from, say, 10 years ago.
In some of today's contending models the singularity (the time-stoppage, the breakdown) is resolved and time-evolution continues on back before. Although there is no consensus about HOW yet, this non-singular feature has attracted a lot of research interest. In several of the new approaches time and space do NOT begin where the "bang" singularity used to be..

To illustrate, here are the latest research publications in the area of quantum cosmology, ranked by how often the article has been cited. Scanning the list of titles one sees the most cited 50 are nearly all nonsingular (no initial singularity, time goes on back before start of expansion.)
http://www-library.desy.de/cgi-bin/spiface/find/hep/www?rawcmd=dk+quantum+cosmology+and+date+%3E+2008&FORMAT=WWW&SEQUENCE=citecount%28d%29

Here's a useful, if somewhat outdated, SciAm article, first page is blank so scroll down:
http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~charley/papers/LineweaverDavisSciAm.pdf
It is 2005, and doesn't mention singularity removal.

Check out the essay "A Tale of Two Big Bangs" at this Institute's public outreach website:
http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/cosmology/?set_language=en
It is slightly more recent, and does mention it, in a couple of paragraphs near the end.

 

[Roysun]

thank you for the help marcus

 

[MrQuarky]

Max Tegmark has loads of poems under the personal part of his website.

 

[gendou2]

Destiny's Fate

The dawn Sun hearkens an eternal, distant day.
Dusty light stirs electrons to their tired routine.
Aged aluminum body pings from thermal expansion.
Tiny droplets of water ice boil and vanish from a shaded nook.
Destiny has no off switch. It awakens every morning.
and in the dimmest depth of winter,
hard-wired its loyalty,
calls home with dying breath.

(Inspired by watching http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/five-years-on-mars-3963)

 

[marcus]

Wow. That's beautiful. I really like that.

The last four lines have a Norse simplicity that reminds me of the very short 2-4 line poems that appear in the middle of otherwise prose historical Icelandic sagas.

The first four lines might eventually evolve into something more lean and tough,
hearkens is a bit ornate. Some adjectives are unnecessary. the reader can infer that it is water ice and not CO2 ice. You can save on syllables and perhaps get more punch by having it happen faster to the reader.

Tiny droplets could be shards, grains, granules, bits, glints, specks...I don't know if any of those are right. Maybe the best (for me) is simply grains.

And maybe it is best exactly as you have it now. I'm not a critic or a teacher. But for some reason I like this quite a lot.

You have a Chinese name. How is it that you remind me of the spare prose of the factual Icelandic sagas? (I don't mean the mythical ones or the Eddas, I don't like them. I like the matter-of-fact family history sagas, and the historical part of the Norwegian Heimskringla.) Maybe what I love about it is the cold barren landscape. My two bit.

 

[MrQuarky]

I'm no expert on poetry, most of the time I'm completely at sea. But I really like this one, probably because its all about the things I've done.

We all believe in relativity. By Max Tegmark

Römer measured the speed of light,
and something basic just wasn't right.
because Michaelson and Morley
showed that aether fit data poorly.

We jump to 1905.
In Einstein's brain, ideas thrive:
"The laws of nature must be the same
in every inertial frame."

Einstein's postulates imply
that planes are shorter when they fly.
Their clocks are slowed by time dilation,
and look warped from aberration.

With the Lorentz transformation,
we calculate the relation
between Chris's and Zoe's frame,
but all invariants, they are the same.

Soon physicists had a proclivity
for using relativity.
But nukes made us all scared
because E=mc2.

But Einstein had another dream,
and in nineteen sixteen
he made a deep unification
between gravity and acceleration.
He said physics ain't hard at all
as long as you are in free fall,
'cos our laws all stay the same
in a locally inertial frame.

If towards a black hole you fall
tides will make you slim tall,
but your friends won't see you enter
a singularity at the center,
because it will look to them
like you got stuck at radius 2M.
But you get squished, despite this balking,
and then evaporate, says Stephen Hawking.

We're in an expanding space
with galaxies all over the place,
and we've learned from Edwin Hubble
that twice the distance makes redshift double
We can with confidence converse
about the age of our universe.
Rival theories are now moot
thanks to Penzias, Wilson, Mather & Smoot.

But what's the physics of creation?
There's a theory called inflation
by Alan Guth and his friends,
but the catch is that it never ends,
making a fractal multiverse
which makes some of their colleagues curse.
Yes there's plenty left to figure out
like what reality is all about about.

 

[ViewsofMars]

I just read on the BBC -2 May 2011 ,Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden dead (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13256676). The article states, "Bin Laden was accused of being behind a number of atrocities, including the attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001." This poem is in memory of those who died and left behind their loved ones.

WHEN THE TOWERS FELL by Galway Kinnell

From our high window we saw the towers
with their bands and blocks of light
brighten against a fading sunset,
saw them at any hour glitter and live
as if the spirits inside them sat up all night
calculating profit and loss, saw them reach up
to steep their tops in the until then invisible
yellow of sunrise, grew so used to them
often we didn’t see them, and now,
not seeing them, we see them.

The banker is talking to London.
Humberto is delivering breakfast sandwiches.
The trader is already working the phone.
The mail sorter has started sorting the mail.
...povres et riches
...poor and rich
Sages et folz, prestres et laiz
Wise and foolish, priests and laymen
Nobles, villains, larges et chiches
Noblemen, serfs, generous and m
Petiz et grans et beaulx et laiz
Short and tall and handsome and homely

The plane screamed low down lower Fifth Avenue
lifted at the Arch, someone said, shaking the dog walkers
in Washington Square Park, drove for the north tower,
struck with a heavy thud, releasing a huge bright gush
of blackened fire, and vanished, leaving a hole
the size and shape a cartoon plane might make
if it had passed harmlessly through and were flying away now,
on the far side, back into the realm of the imaginary.

Some with torn clothing, some bloodied,
some limping at top speed like children
in a three-legged race, some half dragged,
some intact in neat suits and dresses,
they straggle out of step up the avenues,
each dusted to a ghostly whiteness,
their eyes rubbed red as the eyes of a Zahoris,
who can see the dead under the ground.

Some died while calling home to say they were O.K.
Some died after over an hour spent learning they would die.
Some died so abruptly they may have seen death from within it.
Some broke windows and leaned out and waited for rescue.
Some were asphyxiated.
Some burned, their very faces caught fire.
Some fell, letting gravity speed them through their long moment.
Some leapt hand in hand, the elasticity in last bits of love-time letting — I wish
I could say — their vertical streaks down the sky happen more lightly.

At the high window, where I’ve often stood
to escape a nightmare, I meet
the single, unblinking eye
lighting the all-night sniffing and lifting
and sifting for bodies, pieces of bodies, anything that is not nothing,
in a search that always goes on
somewhere, now in New York and Kabul.

She stands on a corner holding up a picture
of her husband. He is smiling. In today’s
wind shift few pass. Sorry sorry sorry.
She startles. Suppose, down the street, that headlong lope...
or, over there, that hair so black it’s purple...
And yet, suppose some evening I forgot
The fare and transfer, yet got by that way
Without recall — lost yet poised in traffic.
Then I might find your eyes...
It could happen. Sorry sorry good luck thank you.
On this side it is “amnesia,” or forgetting the way home,
on the other, “invisibleness,” or never in body returning.
Hard to see clearly in the metallic mist,
or through the sheet of mock reality
cast over our world, bourne that no creature ever born
pokes its way back through, and no love can tear.

The towers burn and fall, burn and fall —
in a distant, shot, smokestacks spewing oily Earth remnants out of the past.
Schwarze Milch der Fruhe wir trinken sie abends
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts
we drink it at midday at morning we drink it at night
wir trinken und trinken
We drink it and drink it
This is not a comparison but a corollary,
not a likeness but a lineage
in the twentieth-century history of violent death —
black men in the South castrated and strung up from trees,
soldiers advancing through mud at ninety thousand dead per mile,
train upon train headed eastward made up of boxcars shoved full to the
corners with Jews and Gypsies to be enslaved or gassed,
state murder of twenty, thirty, forty million of its own,
atomic blasts wiping cities off the earth, firebombings the same,
death marches, starvations, assassinations, disappearances,
entire countries turned into rubble, minefields, mass graves.
Seeing the towers vomit these black omens, that the last century dumped into
this one, for us to dispose of, we know
they are our futures, that is our own black milk crossing the sky: wir shaufeln
ein Grab in den Luften da liegt man nicht eng we’re digging
a grave in the sky there’ll be plenty of room to lie down there

Burst jet fuel, incinerated aluminum, steel fume, crushed marble, exploded
granite, pulverized drywall, mashed concrete, berserked plastic,
gasified mercury, cracked chemicals, scoria, vapor
of the vaporized — wafted here
from the burnings of the past, draped over
our island up to streets regimented
into numbers and letters, breathed across
the great bridges to Brooklyn and the waiting sea:
astringent, miasmic, empyreumatic, slick,
freighted air too foul to take in but we take it in,
too gruesome for seekers of the amnesiac beloved
to breathe but they breathe it and you breathe it.

A photograph of a woman hangs from a string
at his neck. He doesn’t look up.
He stares down at the sidewalk of flagstone
slabs laid down in Whitman’s century, gutter edges
rasped by iron wheels to a melted roundedness:
a conscious intelligence envying the stones.
Nie staja sie, sa.
They do not become, they are.
Nie nad to, myslalem.
Nothing but that, I thought,
zbrzydziwszy sobie
now loathing within myself
wszystko co staje sie
everything that becomes.

And I sat down by the waters of the Hudson,
by the North Cove Yacht Harbor, and thought
how those on the high floors must have suffered: knowing
they would burn alive, and then, burning alive.
and I wondered, Is there a mechanism of death
that so mutilates existence no one
gets over it not even the dead?
Before me I saw, in steel letters welded
to the steel railing posts, Whitman’s words
written as America plunged into war with itself: City of the world!...
Proud and passionate city — mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
words of a time of illusions. Then I remembered
what he wrote after the war was over and Lincoln dead:
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought.
They themselves were fully at rest — they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d...

In our minds the glassy blocks
succumb over and over into themselves,
slam down floor by floor into themselves.

They blow up as if in reverse, exploding
downward and outward, billowing
through the streets, engulfing the fleeing.

As each tower goes down, it concentrates
into itself, transforms itself
infinitely slowly into a black hole

infinitesimally small: mass
without space, where each light,
each life, put out, lies down within us.
###

 

[marcus]

When you copied, the word "mean" did not come thru

Sages et folz, prestres et laiz
Wise and foolish, priests and laymen
Nobles, villains, larges et chiches
Noblemen, serfs, generous and m
Petiz et grans et beaulx et laiz​

If there is time, maybe you can edit.

That is a powerfully evocative poem. Thanks!

The French sounds like Villon, or a contemporary of Villon with some of his spirit.