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Mama Mada
But Still It Moves by Patrick De e le y
Still it moves, Galileo, the world, the universe, the million “ million
million million million miles of observational space;
still expanding, Ed Hubble says, and still
we imagine we are the life and soul, the one sentient hub
of the place. Still we look up, look anew –
of a day to read the weather, of a night to lose ourselves
in the hush that spreads over us, call it
wonderment waiting to be met. A giant tortoise serving
as a griddle for the flat plate of the earth –
not even as children did we fancy there was that.
But Ptolemy we could picture – in our gripping of stars
and planets each to its approved spot
on classroom walls with blue-tack, or in the hoodwink
of the heavens as undeviating before we learned
how Copernicus had run all those circles
in orderly courses about the sun. You, then, never allowed
out again because you dared to let unwelcome truths
in, still Jupiter juggles its moons just as you
saw them, still the dance continues after you’ve gone,
after Newton’s apple hasn’t clocked him
on the head, merely o ccasio ned his notions about gravity,
after Einstein has theorised on what ‘speed’
can mean and ‘spacetime’ do, after Hawking and co
envisage tying together the job lot, huge
with miniscule, while stirring string theory
into the cosmological pot. Meanwhile, for me, this night
waits to be taken to bed – maybe I’ll dream
the twelve-ton ‘Leviathan of Parsonstown’ I saw today
and whose cooped pine boards painted black
set me thinking of a barrel to beat all barrels, our very own
island’s once-upon-a-time world’s biggest telescope,
how it bulges at the middle as though
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