Particles & Pomes

Not much to tell you about since the last time I posted. Things are still all like "work work work" around here and I'm still all like "OK, OK, gimme a break already." Last week we went to Montreal to attend my late grandfather's memorial service, which was very sad and beautiful and exactly what it should have been. We also went to see Hamlet 2, which was silly and weird and quite funny. And tonight we attended a lecture about the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland around which they successfully sent a proton today. The beautiful Latvian nuclear physicist told us that today is the second most important day for science in the last 100 years (the first being the day they launched the Sputnik in 1957). It seems no one knows what kind of things are going to happen when they crash a few proton streams into each other at 99.9997% of the speed of light, so it's very exciting and also kind of scary.

So, yes, we're slowly settling into this funny little town, which means that we have to start behaving more like the fair-trade-coffee-drinking, terrible-colour-combination-wearing hippies that it knows we are in our heart of hearts. Which means that it's time to write some poetry. Actually, these are just a few forgotten short poems I came across in notebooks I was unpacking. I kind of like them, but don't ask me what the heck they mean.

I

I have seen celebrity faces
Whither, pucker, fade from view;
My own hair, slowly silvering
And brittle, falling. I have seen
The taut skin of the paper birch
Punctured by rodent teeth, its sweet
Molasses flesh exposed and left
To poke through fields of snow.

II

Oh children of the meadowlark,
Forever stabbing in the dark,
Deny us not your knives.
You can't begin to comprehend
The lands we seek, the time we spend
Rehearsing our own lives.

III

There was a time
When a sunrise lasted all day long.
Maybe some day, long after we're dead,
They'll notice our trash
And, when they let the wind blow through,
Perhaps remember us.
The earth knows what time it is
Even if the seeds don't,
But you and your family
Are poison to me.

- Andrew