At Science Buffs we like to feature STEM in lots of different ways, whether that be articles about a particular scientific finding, a graduate student feature, or opinion pieces about an issue faced in STEM. This week we another poetry post! Bridget Menasche, a graduate student in the Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, and contributor to Science Buffs, is a scientist by day and a poet by night. She is also an avid artist. This week she has supplied one of her own photographs to illustrate this poem, a photograph taken at the CU Boulder Greenhouse. Stay tuned for more installments of the creative Science Buffs minds at work!
World record
We’re going for a record, my dad says, taking a break
from squalling Hendrix through a hand-rigged amp.
Record disappointment in the cheap seats,
record subway heat and flooded tunnels.
Across the country,
the lilacs open a week early.
Plankton bloom in the cold sea
where the north pole used to be, which tilts
slowly down the surface of the earth
like a top tipped and wobbling.
New records swell across the earth. How many
more of us sweating and cursing this year.
How many wells running dry.
At home, Led Zep on the radio: mean old levee
taught me to weep and moan. If only
you knew, old bluesmen, if only we knew
what would become of us.
Whale sharks ply the equator in small ridges
and humpbacks swan song south
where krill swarm into the meltwater
where Antarctic ice sheets used to be
and if we recover it will be, like the whales
singing after the harpoons have been burned,
in a different world
that we do not recognize,
a world where we need to rename
life in its lesser glories, hopefully less limited
than biologists fear
when we get more than a few drinks in us.
What language will we name in?
Poem and photograph by Bridget Menasche
Science Buffs 