Elizabeth Stott
No Limit to Her Wonderment
The moon, to a little child’s eye
is a cool, lambent wafer
there to be touched
and held up to the light.
Stars sparkle like cold fireworks
and the sun is a warm golden egg.
Science intervenes,
preferring numbers and logic.
Observing dispassionately,
it weaves rules from repeatable experiment.
What is a light year of kilometers to a child,
when she could ride through the stars in a gunpowder rocket,
scoop up cosmic dust in a red plastic bucket
and listen to the crackling of the stars?
Then, later, she finds
depths unsupposed, and recognises beauty.
In the dreaming potentials
she sees
universes from probabilities,
stars out of dust,
life out of chaos.
But science, now the child herself, is unsatisfied,
and keeps on searching for the ultimate answer,
finding only
more questions.
She sees eternity curtailed by theory
and questions her existence,
asking the unaskable.
There is no limit to her wonderment.
Page(s) 173
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