Poetry & Science

I find poetry a valuable complement to science as a lens for exploring existence. Jane Hirschfield expressed this sentiment well:

“Poetry and science are allies, not opposites. Both are instruments of discovery, and together they make the two feet of one walking. We can only weigh the full meaning of facts by how we feel about them. Feelings are meaningful and useful to us because they emerge from the truths of this shifting, astonishing world. Observation and imagination, the microscope and the metaphor, the sense of amazement—you need all of them to take the measure of a moment, of a life. Poetry and science each seek to ground our lives in both what exists and the sense of the large, of mystery and awe. Every scientist I know is grounded in curiosity, wonder, the spirit of exploration, the spirit of service. As is every poet.”  (Jane Hirschfield, “Poets for Science” exhibit at the March for Science demonstration on Earth Day, April 22, 2017)

Here are a few of my attempts to express insights in the form of poems...

The Space Between the Words

(IBHA Origins, vol. V, number 12, December 2015, p. 16)

I want to tell you something.

It's been burning inside me,

Aching to get out. 

Utterly simple yet most profound.

I have to tell you with words,

Even though I can't.

My message lives in the space between the words.

I write them anyway,

Because you need the words

To hear the spaces.

I want to show you something.

So I take you out under the stars.

Point to the constellations, planets, nebulae, & galaxies.

Point out the vastness of our cosmic tapestry,

And the timeline of cosmic history.

But what I want to show you is between the stars,

Or perhaps beyond the stars...

Look closely,

But not too closely.

Between the words.

Between the stars.

Between the atoms.

Between events.

Between the sounds.

Between your feelings.

Between your thoughts.

Then you may hear what I wanted to tell you.

What you wanted to tell you:

I am the universe.

And so are you.

And we exist in the space between the words.

Who Is Writing?

Who is writing,

As I write this?

The small mind

I call "me"?

Or the larger Mind

That is everything?

They are not the same, 

Yet they are not different."