By Jacqui Rowe
Radiolab podcast on Richard Feynman
They’re talking about a famous physicist,
and how, if all of science was eradicated
by a cataclysm, he said, his voice hollow,
echoey with the sixties, the only information
he would want to leave behind for whatever
species was evolving, one sentence, the most
you could say in the fewest words, would be
The Atomic Hypothesis: all things are made
of atoms, in perpetual motion, attracting
each to the other from a small space apart,
when squeezed together, repelling.
But what about music, one of the presenters
asks. Can atoms alone explain how we are
moved? And I switch over to the sounds
of quiet talk and cups clinking at imagined
tables, the squeal of chairs, a chanteuse
purveying jazz, turn that off
and listen for comfort to the rain.
Jacqui Rowe is a Birmingham writer, who has been Writer in Residence at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts where she established and still delivers the Creative Writing Programme. Her latest poetry collection Other Things I Didn't Use To Know is forthcoming from Indigo Dreams, having been joint winner of the press's annual collection competition.