Alchemical Romance

Alchemical Romance
by Gideon Burton

Dark transformations of the primal matter:
through water, air, through fire and through earth,
from lead to tin to silver, up a ladder,
through mercury, iron, copper -- golden birth.
Much more than metal: archetypes and glyphs,
or aqua vitae from alembic stills,
hepatis liquor with its mystic whiffs --
experiment's arcane and cosmic thrills.
From blackness, primal matter, chaos wild,
the yin and yang of substances to jar;
according to the cosmic Emerald Tile
comes quicksilver through roasting cinnabar.
     With secrets alchemists help nature's pace:
     while she perfects in slowness; they, in haste.

Photo: flickr - Chemical Heritage Foundation

By Darwin's Grace

By Darwin's Grace
by Gideon Burton

Survival of the fittest has survived,
but is it fittest? Does it fit the facts?
For isolated species, watch it thrive,
explaining how selection plainly acts
to favor some, while others' numbers thin.
Yet other things survive besides a species,
and many things expire though they win.
The theory fits if fitting things in pieces.
An adaptation presupposes change
is challenge. Is it? And mutation holds
that there exists a standard well arranged,
despite the lack of a priori molds.
     How natural that Darwin made selection;
     that "fittest" facts survived by his election.

Photo: flickr - w.wabbit

Logarithms

Logarithms
by Gideon Burton

He brings Mr Briggs into my Lord's chamber, where almost one quarter of an hour was spent, each beholding other with admiration, before one word was spoken. At last Mr Briggs began, -"My Lord, I have undertaken this long journey purposely to see your person, and to know by what engine of wit or ingenuity you came first to think of this most excellent help unto astronomy, namely, the Logarithms ..." [source]


Those geometric series are insane!
Unlike the simpler arithmetic sort,
where patterns of addition stake their claim,
these others soar in exponential sport.
But through the engine of his native wit
John Napier contrived a handy cheat:
with ratios he discovered he could fit
one's multiplying into adding, neat.
The products that were daunting in their mass,
deflated in simplicity of sums.
More calculations now within their grasp,
astronomers could map the cosmos' suns.
     A few simplicities so clear the ground,
     that worlds emerge where none before were found.

Photo: flickr - Marcin Wichary

Sparrow's Flight

Sparrow's Flight
by Gideon Burton
after a passage from Bede's Ecclesiastical History of England

The swift flight of a sparrow through a room,
this present life, compared to the unknown
abyss beyond the recent or the soon,
deep ignorance that frames our fleshy bones.
We sit at supper, warmed by friends, by fire
while rain or hail attack the bruising roof;
then, suddenly, arrives the tiny flier,
in one door, out the other. There's the proof:
however warmly safe within this space,
the bird is but a fractioned moment's guest.
So much of life is fluttered, winging haste;
the rising sun is setting in the West.
     From out of Winter, fast returning there;
     We are but sparrows, beating thinning air.


Original passage:
"The present life man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space but of what went before or what is to follow we are ignorant." [source]

Photo: flickr - Flavio@Flickr (adapted)

For Ptolemy

For Ptolemy
by Gideon Burton


What if Copernicus himself were wrong
About the earth and sun? How many men
Or women skyward turn and study long
With instruments and charts so they'll know when
A tiny prick of light unravels all?
Or who have tamed the mysteries of math,
Abstractions that themselves cast deeper pall
Than midnight's starry field? A limpid bath
Of noonday light reveals our center sure,
Around whose fixed seat the sun, the moon
To billions have portrayed their coursing blur.
To say we turn around the sun, what boon?
        We bow to learned men and to their books,
        Though they defy how plain the cosmos looks.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr- Carolune

Time's Passed

Time's Passed

by Gideon Burton

It isn't all the constancy of change,

nor that the past recedes with giant strides.

It isn't time is fast, or spreading wide,

nor that it's hard to contemplate its range.

What's troubling is the way we rearrange

the packaging; we change the terms; then pride

ourselves the past is fastened fast inside

events or periods we've made unstrange.

The past is not a line, a map, a thing;

like people: known and yet much more unknown,

compounding with the data and the dust

of what remains and what the present brings.

Its agents surface and submerge. We're shown

what was expected: ah, such pretty rust.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - Martin Ujlaki

Notre Dame de Paris

To me the social architecture of a cathedral outstrips its aesthetic wonders. A cathedral is a monument to a community, to a way of life, to a view of things bigger than one's own little world. It was Victor Hugo's novel, Notre Dame de Paris, that led me to understand a cathedral's power, and this one in particular. I think the high dynamic range of this photo brings out that sense of the glowing presence this building has had in Paris and in the imagination for centuries.

Notre Dame de Paris

by Gideon Burton

Great ribs of stone rise romanesque, then vault

Into the dark and airy transept's top.

Two vast and colored windows, round, will halt

And heat the light to rosy hues, not stop

The sight of heaven that two hundred years

Brought pious masons, carpenters and all

The cutting grinding laborers so near

To godly mystery, its silent pall

Uplifting with the buttressed walls of mass.

A vision, wafer thin and ruddy red,

In sweaty time to sons from fathers passed

Who saw God's finished house when they were dead.

       She marks the tomb of peasants, and the times,

       Part sepulcher, part temple, part sublime.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Image: flickr - xelcise

Ozymandias - A classic sonnet

Image by Brooklyn Museum via Flickr

(For some reason my auto-posting didn't work and so yesterday (3/3/10) nothing was posted on my new blog promising something posted every day (alas!). So, today I'm posting two sonnets to make up for it. ) 

The previous sonnet, "Rosetta," was in part inspired by this classic one from Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias." I remember once when I was in high school, working a summer job with a lot of misfits scraping weeds from school parking lots. One of the men paused from his work, leaned on his hoe, and then recited Ozymandias in mournful tones somehow very appropriate both to the poem and that moment. I've learned not to underestimate either those who labor with their hands or with their iambic pentameter:

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Rosetta Stone

A block of broken basalt, food for sand,
a grave and silent priest who holds his tongue
and hides his triple tongues that praised the man,
King Ptolemy, whose benefices sung
in trio, quarried chorus etched in white
on black, that conquering Greece could ready read
what ebbing Egypt eked with chiseling bite
in sacred glyphs due honors to be said
in swift Demotic, deference and dread.
A stone, confetti for a king’s parade,
though pharaohs of the pyramids lay dead
whose mighty mysteries in silence fade.        
   Not sphinx nor obelisk in desert found        
   compare to this light stone left on the ground.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgement of authorship