Copernicus
The dethronement of the Earth from the centre
of the universe came in 1543
on a death bed, by one seventy year old man.
His first occultation in Bologna
precognized the taste for higher things.
Even then it was known he would shine
brighter than Aldebaran.
Greek, medicine, mathematics, theology, astronomy...
the disciplines racked up, crumbled under
its student’s perpetual thirst, that need to know.
Here was an academic who ate establishments whole
as Krakow, Padua, and Ferrara will testify.
Get this lucrative sideline: he translated into Latin
the verses of Theophylactus, for his maternal uncle,
on nothing more than a whim.
Little surprise then
that Ptolemy’s geocentric interpretation of the heavens
was fair fodder to his humbling canon.
Their old arrangements were out and gone.
More importantly, having smashed the myth
on falling bodies, and a natural place,
he set in motion Newton
who would further upset this apple cart given time.
And so now we turn to some bedtime reading:
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium VI.
Page(s) 119
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