The gods of poetry surely must experience severe bouts of eye-rolling boredom—a result of all too many weightless, inconsequential poems. But this anthology for young adults demonstrates poetry’s superpowers by offering more than one-hundred inspiring works exploring engineering, technology, biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and other science subjects all sheathed in the velvet glove of beautiful verse.
Somebody Ought to Write a Poem for Ptolemy
Somebody ought to write a poem for Ptolemy,
So ingenious in being wrong, he was almost a poet.
Can anyone follow his configurations?
How he cut a tortured path for every planet
Until his numbers matched what he could see,
Every one spectacularly wrong.
You would think, in all those years of calculations,
He would, at least, have suspected a simpler way.
Maybe he even knew it all along—
The stationary sun, ellipses, everything —
But kept it to himself as too unseemly
Or to save his pregnant wife from all the spinning
And wait beside her in a quiet place
That he, himself, had rendered motionless.
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