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.
Posts
