I love poetry. I love science. So what better way to combine my two loves than by starting Science Poem of the Week?
Herewith DiscoBlog’s first science poem, in celebration of autumn rains and the approaching winter:
Earth’s Embroidery
By Solomon Ibn Gabirol
With the ink of its showers and rains
With the quill of its lightning, with the
Hand of its clouds, winter wrote a letter
Upon the garden, in purple and blue
No artist could conceive the like of that.
And this is why the earth, grown
Jealous of the sky, embroidered stars in
The folds of the flower beds.
Note: Solomon Ibn Gabirol was a Spanish poet, philosopher and moralist who has been called “the Jewish Plato.” He was born in Málaga in about 1021 and died in about 1058 in Valencia. His works include “‘Ana?,” a 400-verse Hebrew grammar arranged as an alphabetical acrostic, and “The Improvement of the Moral Qualities,” a treatise in which Gabirol codified a system of ethics independent of religious belief or dogma. For more of his poetry, see The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, edited and translated by T. Carmi (Penguin, 1981.)
