30 Days xYz - Black Holes and Dark Matter, Holometabolism and Sinewaves - the poetry of the cosmos

My birthday tends to straggle on, for days, weeks even.  I rather like that it isn’t focused on one particular day.  It gives me time to adjust to being (numerically, at least) another year older.  And I like that my friends and family are as  blissfully disorganised as I am and so I tend to get cards and parcels for quite some time after the event (horizon).

And I like the fact that my manifestation skills seem to be perking up again.   The other day, a snugly throw; yesterday, snugly boots (just in the nick of time, as mine now have holes in the toes).  And today, a card from my lovely niece.  Columbia Road Market.  And all at once I’m transported back to my London days.   Every so often I’d get up early (way too early) on a Sunday, nab my friend Fi, and potter down to Columbia Road.   For those who don’t know, Columbia Road is a flower and plant market and there was something wildly uplifting about wandering around swathed in scent and colour.  There would probably be coffee and breakfast involved too – at a small café.  

So, the card alone was enough.  But there was also a slim book enclosed, its cover green and gold, hinting of sacred geometry.  30 DAYS, it said.  xYz.  

And, on the back, an almost runic inscription: 

She knows me well, that nice niece of mine. 

I opened it. 

It’s a small book of poems superimposed on illustrations and inspired by cosmology and nature.  The poet created them, one a day, during April 2013, for National Poetry Week.  And it says things like…

"It’s always the same.

It always happens the same

with mass and energy:

one created destroys the other,

and the yin-yang of the stars

maintains the indifferent symmetry

of space and time."

And this…

And this…

And this...

I like it.  I like the thick sludge of its paper; the crisp clarity of its type.  I like its subject matter and its production.  I like its poems but I like them more because of the way they are presented.  And it strikes me that maybe this is the way to offer poetry to our modern minds.  Because it’s said (I typed ‘sad’ then and that true) that we don’t read poetry so much these days.  Maybe we might make poetry manifest, tickle it tactile, snaffle it sniffable and strokable.  A challenge maybe for my poet friends X, Y and Z?  

And Time?  The last gasp of the book says this:  Kairos - a time lapse, a moment of indeterminate time in which everything happens, the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment).  Time is Now.