from UPSTART -- A Magazine of Art + Culture + Life

THANK YOU, Greg Coxson,
for frequent sharing of MATHY POEMS with me!

      Gregory Coxson, professor and researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the US Naval Academy, is a supporter of integration of the arts with the sciences and enjoys writing poems.  (Here is a link to his previous appearances in this blog -- including a couple of poems that he created.)  

    Greg has sent me some sample poems from the Summer, 2025 issue of  Up.St.ART, a magazine that focuses on and celebrates the arts in the Annapolis, MD region.  The issue that Coxson alerted me to has a special collection of Harvested Words -- poems built by selecting phrases from another publication.  From this collection I share a poem, shown below, that is built from phrases selected from the book Probable Impossibilities by Alan Lightman; the selector is poet Natalie Canavor of Annapolis, MD, and she has given me permission to include her poem here:    

     Glimmerings      by Natalie Canavor

          A tiny splash, in infinity . . .
          A new particle of light . . .
          A clock, a map, a piece of the ribbon:
          Our own cosmos of meaning.

          The direction of time
          makes an ancient pattern.
          Eternity versus animal brevity--
          a cruel and comic mismatch.

          Billions of neurons,
          chandeliers of imagination:
          We have been but ghosts chattering
          through twisting corridors of time.

          When all the stars in space burn out
          the picture will grow dimmer.
          All matter disintegrates.
          Universe spins away into nothingness,

          Eternity was a gargantuan negative.
          But we have seen--felt--lived!
          The atoms in our bodies
          were made in stars.