Australian poet Geoffrey Lehmann is also a writer of children's books and a tax lawyer. This mathy poem comes from his collection, Spring Forest (Faber & Faber, 1994); I found it in the anthology A Quark for Mister Mark: 101 Poems about Science (editors--Maurice Riordan, Jon Turney; Faber & Faber, 2000) -- a collection introduced to me by Australian poet, Erica Jolly.
Not Yet Found by Geoffrey Lehmann
I chose the name Spring Forest
and I've yet to find the spring.
Some unfinished equations
are the closest I've come
to the puzzle of why I'm here.
There is a book before our eyes --
the night sky of the universe.
Galileo saw its language was mathematics.
A cricket's encrypted love song,
light from an ancient start
are mathematical messages
arriving in sultry air.
Imaginary and complex numbers
allow life to reproduce itself
endlessly and intricately
without repetition --
the elusive algorithms of a summer night.
Another fine poem from the same anthology is "Homage to Godel," by Hans Magnus Enzenberger -- and included in a 2016 posting at this link. And another is "Of many Worlds in this World" by Margaret Cavendish at this link.
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