Sunday, September 9, 2018

In Honor Of A Humble Vessel

A mathematician
had second thoughts
-second being an ordinal number--
about filling the bird feeder during a lightning storm,
but she put on her boots and slicker and went.

The feeder, reflecting the weird light
put her in mind of the empty set.
The ground ivy made her mind wander,
wondering if flora can have roots of polynomials.
Anyway, she filled the tube, remarking to herself that the seeds
seemed like integers, unless some of them were splintered.

At that moment,
she became a positive invitation for a negative charge
and fell dead and smoking to the ground, but her soul departed in glory.
So, was the abandoned husk of her body--her very own empty set--really empty?
Night passed and dawn arrived.
The little fence around the flower bed looked like brackets in the early light.

No one found her,
but a redbird perched in her hair poking for millet seeds,
giving her earthly remains a cardinality of one, not zero.
________

for this.

10 comments:

  1. I who am blind to numbers except in their more mystic aspects found light and mathematics in your very tight Poem

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  2. Oh my gosh, Shay! This is so amazing!!! Absolute perfection. Thank you so much for taking the time to write this. I really appreciate you sharing your beautiful mind's art.

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  3. Now this is creative, sad, and funny all at once. Since one of my minors for one of my degrees was math, I totally appreciate this. The last stanza is truly epic. Thank you for posting to my prompt.

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  4. Absolutely effing fantastic, Shay. One of a kind poem.

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  5. Her soul departed in glory, her last act being one of giving. I LOVE the redbird poking through her hair for millet seeds. This poem is fantastic!

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  6. this is what I call, crunching numbers?

    actually, it's a "weird little story" - that works really well for the telling, slight and macabre as it is; you've employed some great word play and "probabilities" which make it a treat to read; the marrying of person to nature and how lightning strikes, and raising it to the level of sets and subsets, etc. in order to delve into the concept of nothingness and void, is finely tuned here, with a wonderful and wonder filled poetic imagery that is pleasurable.

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  7. You make this seem so smooth, so effortless, and tho I do not speak math, I find the language very resonant in its sorrowful grasp of all our limitations and our possibilities. The brackets line, especially, was magical, as is the finish.

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don't be stupid.