The Tuesday Poem: Featuring Helen Heath & “Night’s Magic”
Night’s Magic ………………………………………………..Sir Isaac Newton (1643 –1727)
"Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians." – John Maynard Keynes.
When Isaac closes his eyes
he is hanging, arms outstretched
only faith keeps him
from falling – a magic trick.
In his left hand is the Book of Revelations
in the right, the Book of Nature,
written in geometry.
He opens his eyes to take note
of God’s will in action. Observations
must be interpreted –
bodies in motion, fruit from the tree.
Reclusive, he experiments upon himself,
slides a bodkin into his eye socket
between eyeball and bone
until he sees severall white darke
& coloured circles.
Sibyls and Daemons
are still close enough
for him to hear their voices.
The sun rises so slowly it’s too hard
to pick the moment of first light
or the last of the night’s magic.
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(c) Helen Heath
Published in “Graft” (Victoria University Press, 2012)
Reproduced here with permission.
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About The Poem:
Currently, I am re-posting poets who have had multiple poems featured here on “…Anything, Really” since I joined the Tuesday Poem community in June 2010. Night’s Magic first featured on August 14, 2012, at which time I wrote:
“One of the aspects that immediately interested me with this book [Graft]was what I call the “history of science” poems, focused around such seminal figures as Sir Isaac Newton (Night’s Magic), Marie Curie (Radiant), astronomer Beatrice Tinsley (Spiral Arms) and Galileo Galilei (And Yet It Moves.) The poem Making Tea In The Universe, which won the inuagural ScienceTeller Poetry Award in 2011, is also part of this sequence.”
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About the Poet:
Helen Heath is the author of Graft, a collection of poems. In 2009 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML, where she is currently working toward her PhD. Her research project explores how science is represented in poetry. She is using this research to write poems about the intersect between people and technology. Helen won the inaugural ScienceTeller Poetry Award in 2011 for her poem ‘Making Tea in the Universe’. Graft received the Jessie McKay award for Best First Book of Poetry in the New Zealand Post Book Awards, 2013, and the collection as a whole was shortlisted for the bi-annual Royal Society Science Book prize 2013 (making it the first ever poetry or fiction book to be shortlisted). Graft’s publication was also included in the NZ Listener’s Top 100 Books in 2012, and Best New Zealand Poems 2012. Helen Heath’s writing has been published in many journals in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US. She blogs at helenheath.com and writes poetry and essays.
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