A Poem Structured by a Finite Field

       Mathematician Ursula Whitcher is an Associate Editor for the American Mathematical Society's Mathematical Reviews and a poet -- someone whom I first met at a conference, "Creative Writing in Mathematics," at the Banff International Research Station in 2016.  conferences.  She is a versatile writer  -- with a long list of publications available here at her website.

     Here is Whitcher's mathematically-structured poem, "Tuesday," first published in 2019 in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, at this link.

     Tuesday     by Ursula Whitcher

          Sometimes it is not possible to mend
          what’s broken, either if you meant
          to prove something impossible, or else
          to save someone. Your best friend has
          not eaten for six days.  Your father loses things. 
          Your brother lies.
          It’s Tuesday, so the week’s no longer new, and yet
          nowhere near done.
          All you can do is move
          and keep on moving, trust
          time changes shattered things
          and lies once known are maps.

Author’s Note. This poem’s form is taken from the structure of the field with seven elements: the meter, in iambs, follows a pattern based on 5, 4, 6, 2, 3, the nontrivial values taken by powers of 5 (mod 7) as it generates the group of units of the field.

Previous mentions of Ursula Whitcher in this blog are listed at this link.