I awake long before dawn
From a night of too few dreams,
The name Galileo playing
On my sleep-eyed morning mind.
I grieve for adventures, unplayed.
Fantasies unrealised. Mountains
Unclimbed. Now unclimbable
In the prosaic world of awakening
But not awareness. Never that.
The place for problem solving has gone.
The cerebral location where mental buckets
Could be emptied, freeing me of carrying
Yesterday into today, and on into tomorrow
Has been snatched, from beneath my nose
By an Antipodean in a time warp, so she claims
Broadcasting utopian ‘news from nowhere’
Or maybe the ‘Erehwon’ of Samuel Butler
With far more sheep and down under attitude
Stealing sleep away from me, and with it, dreaming
Scheming time. Depriving me of answers to puzzles
Muzzling me with yawns and yawning
As new day dawns and with it, regret is realised.
But what of Galileo (1564-1642)
Polymath from Pisa. Father of modern Science
Observer of the skies. Listener to planetary music
As space spheres turned and churned out melody
Unheard by common men. Inaudible, but there.
I don’t know. All I possess of him is a name, hanging
On my thirsty lips. Diabetic dry.
What has the old Italian sky pilot
To say what ? To guide my on my way ?
What compass point ?
Which longed for latitude
Will he share with me ?
Galileo, are you my lodestone.
My animal magnet.
My prophet and my mighty ‘Seer’
To set me on the path of righteous enquiry.
I will never know, for like old Samuel Coleridge
Dreaming ‘The Ancient Mariner’ in Somerset
My own female ‘Man From Porlock’
Knocks on my virtual cottage door
In an act of ‘coitus interruptus’
And I withdraw, before I have come
And the poetic progeny
I might have spawned
Is no longer to be found.
No morning glory, sown and realised.
No Mariner. No Albatros around his neck
No thirst that only can be slaked by bird blood.
Nothing like it. Just the name, left in its stead
As sure as Edward Thomas clung to Adlestrop
Just the name. A small station in Gloucestershire
I am left with your name, to birth me into waking.
Something, and nothing. A name of such power
A giant’s name, on whose mighty shoulders
Science stands, peering into unborn futures
Trying its level best to understand.
I awake, long before dawn
From a night of too few dreams,
The name Galilei Galileo playing
On my sleep-eyed, morning mind.
Roger Stennett
5-2-23
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