The Final Sentence

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.