In the Dark

Apologies for my posts being a bit thin on original content recently. There’s a lot going on at the moment and it has not been easy to find the time to write at any length. Before too long I hope to be able to get back into the swing of things and maybe even blog about science. Or even do some! In the meantime, however, I couldn’t resist passing on this poem called, At It, by R.S. Thomas. I’ve posted some of his verse on previous occasions, but I only found this one a few days ago and couldn’t resist sharing it, not least because it mentions Sir Arthur Eddington (probably in a reference to one of his popular science books).

I think he sits at that strange table
of Eddington’s. That is not a table
at all, but nodes and molecules
pushing against molecules
and nodes; and he writes there
in invisible handwriting the instructions
the genes follow. I imagine his
face that is more the face
of a clock, and the time told by it
is now, though Greece is referred
to and Egypt and empires
not yet begun.
+++++++++ And I would have
things to say to this God
at the judgement, storming at him,
as Job stormed with the eloquence
of the abused heart. But there will
be no judgement other than the verdict
of his calculations, that abstruse
geometry that proceeds eternally
in the silence beyond right and wrong.

This entry was posted on November 18, 2010 at 9:31 pm and is filed under Poetry, The Universe and Stuff with tags A.S Eddington, Poetry, R. S. Thomas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.