Listen to Emily reading this poem:
therefore have I given you an astrolabe sufficient for our location, calibrated to the latitude of Oxford, upon which is the text of this little treatise – Geoffrey Chaucer to his son, Lewis, 1390s
Here at the bottom of Europe, closer to the equator,
the smartphone in my hand says the moon tonight
is a crescent waning, forty per cent illumination.
Like an astrolabe of the middle ages, it can compress
the cosmos, but with this feed of information
I’ve no need to memorise constellations
or tell the time from the height of the sun;
the art of lunar navigation is an imperative
of the past. Yet, my need to feel the wheel of
the seasons in my bloodstream remains strong.
I marvel at Islamic astronomers, like Mariam
who flattened the globe to fit in her palm,
condensed the celestial zodiac, made it
graspable to man, the latitude and longitude
of fixed stars written in the margin of the rete.
Could I, like Chaucer, write a treatise for my son
on how my cell phone runs? Kundera wrote that
Goethe lived in the last epoch where we could
fully understand how all technology worked.
One thing I have learned: in the summer of 2061
Halley’s comet will blaze again at perihelion.
Emily Cullen is a Galway-based writer and the Meskell Poet in Residence at the University of Limerick, where she lectures on the MA in Creative Writing. She has published three poetry collections to date: Conditional Perfect (Doire Press, 2019), In Between Angels and Animals (Arlen House, 2013) and No Vague Utopia (Ainnir Publishing, 2003). Conditional Perfect was included in The Irish Times round-up of “the best new poetry of 2019”. Emily holds a PhD in English from the University of Galway. Twice nominated for the Pushcart prize, her poetry explores themes of history, social justice, ecology, music and the female experience.
Loved this!