Song of Two Worlds

  • Alan Lightman
A. K. Peters: 2009. 112 pp. $24.95

Physicist and author Alan Lightman's latest work is a book-length poem. In Song of Two Worlds, he writes from the perspective of a man reassessing his life after a tragedy. Lightman splits his epic into two sections; in the first, he marvels at the measurable world, the glory of geometry and fact. In the second, he explores the unmeasurable, the pleasure and pain of love, the beauty of a sunset and the night sky. An excerpt from the latter section is reproduced here.

Credit: ILLUSTRATION BY JONATHAN BURTON.

Excerpt from Song of Two Worlds

I am a fragment That hurtles through space While the breeze of the universe Ruffles my hair.

Evening. I gaze Through my telescope, Searching the colors of stars. Some are the hues of goats' wool, Some ochre olive, Or pink bougainvillea.

In chasms of space I see stars born from gases, Great thrumming furnaces oozing their heat, Convective motions, electron opacities — Elsewhere stars dying, Cold cinders Or giant explosions, eruptions of light, Cities consumed in a nuclear blast, Billions of years dimmed in a second.

I have learned That the heavens are violent and fragile And doomed to destruction, Just as this thimble the earth. All in the cosmos is failing, And nothing remains, And we measure the hour of the stars, As I measure one morning's light.

Here, in the glass of this eyepiece.