Jenny Hammond
Oxford Stanza Two
Beauty, elegance and other abstractions
If Harry could hear our poems today
how would he respond? For him
the science itself would be poetry enough.
Wouldn’t he, enamoured of harmony,
balance, proportion, have viewed the world
as a work of art, responded to the symmetry
at the heart of nature? Words cannot
unravel the mysteries within the atom
or enlighten the search for answers.
The proper language for that is maths.
All we can do is rustle up a few
abstractions and try to imagine a poem
of mathematical equations taking
our breath away and wonder what they mean
by the exuberant, spontaneous creativity
of electrons.
© Jenny Hammond, October 2015