Found by Karen Solie
Elementary Calculus
From Elementary Calculus A. Keith and W. J. Donaldson.
Glasgow: Gibson, 1960.
Speed (like distance)
is a magnitude and has no
direction; velocity (like displacement)
has magnitude and direction.
Thus we may say
that after 4 seconds
the stone is travelling at a speed
of 32 feet per second,
but if we wish to remove all doubts
as to the direction of motion
we must add the word
downwards.
Returning to the problem
about the stone
we have sometimes written
32 ft. per (sec.)². The reader
should think out for himself
why the phrase per second
occurs twice. The quantity
in question sounds more meaningful
if read: 32 feet per second
-- pause --
per second.
Thanks to Tim Love for alerting me to this poem. I now have it in a recently
purchased copy of Solie’s collection The Living Option: Selected Poems
(Bloodaxe Books, 2013). And there's more; on the page following "Found" we find "Cipher Stroke" which begins thus:
India opened zero and gods crawled out.
Several other poems in the collection continue the trend. This poet likes to speak of mathematics!
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