For Sir Isaac Newton
The Movement of Bodies by Sheenagh Pugh
He fractured white light into seven colours,
reckoned the distance to the moon,
wrote laws for the movement
of bodies: no mystery to him,
until now. Planets in their orbit,
the sea’s tides, his eyes
locked to the lit face
of the young mathematician.
A body at rest remains so
unless some force act on it.
So many years, no joy
but in numbers, no troubling
of the flesh. The pink tongue-tip
idly licking a finger
constricts his heart. His edges
flicker, scintillate, like a heat-haze.
A hand brushes his cheek
and it colours: to each action
an equal and opposite reaction.
He tries to think straight:
the moon. I worked out its mass. Moonlight,
kissing in moonlight. The movement
of bodies. The moon draws
the tides. A knife in my eye.
Once, probing for truth,
he nearly blinded himself.
This time he will flinch
from the lacerating light.
Legend will say he died a virgin,
and never saw the sea.
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