Friday, 28 January 2011

The Expanding Universe - Written for Sing! 2011


 My friend Mark Walsmely (who you can find at Demo Doctor) asked if I could write lyrics for a science theme song as a candidate for Sing!  the ABCs primary schools song book.  It sounded tricky and I thought I would cheat and adapt a poem I'd written about fossil fish but the first line of this appeared while I was making minestrone and viola!  Mark W. set it brilliantly to music, so it feels like we are listening to Albert E. playing the accordian in a Weimer Republic caberet in 1930.

Note: The photo may look like Tiny Tots stuck together but it really is a large gluon which was found in our kitchen, showing how adaptable to domesticity physics really is.

The Expanding Universe
or
Apples, cheese and fleas

Verse 1
Given gravity’s a form of stretchy glue
so apples fall down, instead of up to you
there’s also something larger  and mysterious
that pushes things apart,  that’s big and serious.
Einstein did not like it but allowed it might be true…

chorus
The dark parts of the universe
the cosmologic stuffing,
you can’t see or feel it
but it’s definitely not nothing,
more mysterious than cheese
far more discreet than fleas
darker than the dark side of the moon
and it’s right here, right now,
streaming through this room.

Verse 2
It’s dark energy that keeps us from imploding
it’s dark matters which prove to be consoling
it isn’t energy or matter as we know it
it’s hard to hold and harder to throw it

Verse 3
Since the Big Bang we’ve been getting faster
we’re speeding up but it’s hardly a disaster
oh the fun of being in an accelerating universe
without the dark side things would be much worse.
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Absent Knowledge

We are talking about knowing certain facts,

and he says, I know all that or used to,

it is only that I can’t remember.

Is this not knowing or forgetting

what you know? Perhaps the head holds

a trace of what was there,

perhaps it is there but can’t find

the way out; maybe it was there but left,

or there was a rumour that it was coming

but never did,


like the promised holiday ,

in Pennant Hills. At eight years old

I would lie in bed at night a hardly contained

precipice of anticipation that time

would take me to Pennant Hills and a big house

with a swimming pool. I can see

the façade of the house, the curve

of suburban street, where that house

I never went to might be - or even was.

Though I know I never went, maybe

somewhere, there is an unborn memory

of being there, and I am thwarted by absent knowledge

from enjoying what I did not do.





Carol Jenkins



This poem was recently published in Voices from the Meadow Wollongong Workshop Anthology 2007 ( Five Islands Press)

About Me

Carol Jenkins produces the River Road Poetry Series, launched on the 1st December 2007 there are now 20 CDs in the series and more on the way. Pop over to www.riverroadpress.net to check it out. Her first book Fishing in the Devonian was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier's Prize and the Anne Elder. She is a novelist, short story writer, poet and visual artist whose work has been published in magazines and ezines. Her writing reflects various obsessions, including intersections of science and literature.