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 rainsWith the quill of its lightning, with theHand of its clouds, winter wrote a letterUpon the garden, in purple and blueNo artist could conceive the like of that.And this is why the earth, grownJealous 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.)
