Ode to light

The first ray of dawn,

The first star at night,

A dew-glittering lawn,

A photonic delight!

It surrounds us by day,

And when times are less bright,

There is always a way

To follow the light.

Flick a switch in a room.

See a glow by our camera!

Through a fibre in the sea

We can speak! Hear! At high speed!

Thanks to “c over lambda”

There’s UV and infrared,

The EM Spectrum covers all!

We hear radio, see heat spread,

It’s optics, y’all!

Diffraction, refraction, reflection, galore!

There’s Strickland, Young, Raman, and Einstein, and more!

Its not just a bulb, it’s plasma, it’s a laser.

It lets us send messages, find distance, set phasers!

Why oh why!

The poem’s phase shifted half-pi!

Aw, man!

I hope that you know that this wasn’t my plan.

Ugh! It was so bad it broke our coherence!

…Ah! That lets us mention some slit interference!

Use a waveplate!

Phase is back!

Make a rail slate,

Keep on track!

We can make an optical gate,

Or analyze the stars of the Zodiac!

We can’t finish this poem yet,

There’re more lines left in sight.

The best is in a quartet,

Of which brilliant Maxwell did write,

From a Laser Jock’s Cadet,

I say, let there be light!