Poetry is the emotional side of a novel distilled into short verse. Good poetry moves me, it puts a lump in my throat, and it makes me zoom out – to see life for what it is. Poems, really well-written poems, feel like miracles to me.
Rebecca Elson was a scientist and a poet and those two things are beautifully married in her book A Responsibility to Awe. Her life was cut far too short but we can find her in her quietly profound poetry that’s just bursting with this love and wonder at our world. She’s moved me to tears more than once, voice choked, face screwing up like a damp tissue, you know the drill.
Antidotes to Fear of Death is an incredibly poignant poem and the last verse touches something inside of me, plucking a bitter-sweet, wistful chord:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings
Another one of her poems that I go back to many times is Girl with a Balloon and it’s really the last three lines that get me. It’s talking about helium, of which they say the majority was created in the Big Bang:
A red balloon,
A little bit of pure Big Bang,
Bobbing at the end of her string.
It’s just the miracle of it that gets to me. The wonder that everything – all that we can see in this very moment – is a miracle. We are made of the stuff of stars. Something that seems as ordinary as a balloon can contain wonders.
I really do recommend this collection.
of words & books 