Giles Watson's poetry and prose
Life's Shadow
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFs8870TN3U
Life’s Shadow
A child cries in ascending spirals;
a mother reprimands. Sounds
hang in space, spin anti-parallel.
Our little clattering lives twine
like polymers. They are all in code,
and the shadows merge, part,
blend, separate, coalesce, split.
We are remembered in guanine,
adenine, thymine, cytosine.
Projected, we loom, approach,
pass by, cross over, dissipate.
We’re all colours and no colour;
We rise, we sink, we fade;
we’re the dance of light and shade:
we dream up God. Our tears
are the first true things he made.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2012.
The picture shows the shadow of a rotating model of a DNA molecule in the University Museum of Natural History, Oxford.
Life's Shadow
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFs8870TN3U
Life’s Shadow
A child cries in ascending spirals;
a mother reprimands. Sounds
hang in space, spin anti-parallel.
Our little clattering lives twine
like polymers. They are all in code,
and the shadows merge, part,
blend, separate, coalesce, split.
We are remembered in guanine,
adenine, thymine, cytosine.
Projected, we loom, approach,
pass by, cross over, dissipate.
We’re all colours and no colour;
We rise, we sink, we fade;
we’re the dance of light and shade:
we dream up God. Our tears
are the first true things he made.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2012.
The picture shows the shadow of a rotating model of a DNA molecule in the University Museum of Natural History, Oxford.