We Astronomers by Rebecca Elson
We Astronomers
Rebecca ElsonWe astronomers are nomads,
Merchants, circus people,
All the earth our tent.We are industrious.
We breed enthusiasms,
Honour our responsibility to awe.But the universe has moved a long way off.
Sometimes, I confess,
Starlight seems too sharp,And like the moon
I bend my face to the ground,
To the small patch where each foot falls,Before it falls,
And I forget to ask questions,
And only count things.
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SHARED WITH GRATITUDE
This poem appeared in A Responsibility to Awe by Rebecca Elson, published by Carcanet Classics, 2018. (Available on: Amazon • Bookshop)
DESCRIPTION
“Rebecca Elson’s A Responsibility to Awe reissued as a Carcanet Classic
A Responsibility to Awe is a contemporary classic, a book of poems and reflections by a scientist for whom poetry was a necessary aspect of research, crucial to understanding the world and her place in it, even as, having contracted terminal cancer, she confronted her early death. Rebecca Elson was an astronomer; her work took her to the boundary of the visible and measurable. “Facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination,” she wrote. Her poems, like her researches, build imaginative inferences and speculations, setting out from observation, undeterred by knowing how little we can know.” (Source)
ABOUT REBECCA ELSON
Rebecca Elson was an astronomer. Her principal work focused on globular clusters, teasing out the history of stellar birth, life and death. Born inMontreal, Quebec, of Canadian and US parents, she studied at Smith, St Andrews, and the University of British Columbia. She took her PhD at Cambridge, where she won an Isaac Newton Studentship. She started publishing poems while working at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton, and researched at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. In… (more)
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ENDNOTES
- Explore other works in pursuit of: awe • nomadism • Disillusionment • Or browse the index
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