Five and almost of a kind by Andrew Senior

I
Never let it be

Never let it be
forgot seeing is feeling
in another form

Sight the light of the blind
Sensation spent in a brain

II
I am most at home

I am most at home
in my imagination
as when science meets

crafted art, sees gravity’s
engines burning in the stars

III
Atoms are the shoes

Atoms are the shoes
of shape. We put them on to
walk this world. Smitten

with them we gallop over
its edge and into the dark

IV
How clever we are

How clever we are
to see what’s coming writing
on bark and spelling

with sticks taken from what had
already deciphered light

V
How dark a pupil

How dark a pupil
looks amplifying light’s streams
exchanging shadings

for meanings when trees convert
them only to be their lives

These five poems, “Shorts” as W.H. Auden used to call them, are part of a long series of meditations in poetry and essay about humility and ignorance, language and its limits and hence also the limits of knowledge. All in the context of science, particularly physics which is my over-riding interest.

Andrew Senior’s lifelong interest in science began as an often bed-ridden sickly child around the age of eight or nine with Astronomy. His professional career was in IT in the world of Unix/Linux servers. But Andrew never gave up an interest in science which by then had expanded from physics into biology courtesy of the best layman source there then was: The Scientific American. Long retired Andrew has continued these interests much assisted by the Internet, puzzling over the ruthless determination of humans to acquire power, gambling with their own extinction in the classic casino manner.