Our Scientist, Hallowed be thy name! August 2, 2010

Are we happy now?

Now that the last of the fairies is dead?

Now that God and his angels quiver in heaven

and the vicars in black run from new priests in white?

Are you happy now?

No-one cared when they came for the dragons,

the unicorns, pixies and elves.

Nobody fought for the mermaids and goblins,

After all, we wanted to be free!

We would build our own heaven, not God’s,

and the men in white would defeat death on their own.

Why bother to love our neighbours as ourselves?

You couldn’t ring it up on the till!

But now that the men in white come for the meadows,

the ponds and the seas and the rainforests too.

Now that they smother the fields in tarmac

and choke all the skies with their carbon and fumes,

now that they tie us with ropes of their logic

and offer us Nike eternal,

are we happy now?

Are they happy now?

Sometimes, on the breeze, comes the music of fairies

and a faint curl of scent from a long extinct bloom.

Then, if just for a moment, I sense true happiness

and the scowls of the new priests in white.

.

Paul Hughes, 2010

An Elementary Tongue Twister. November 14, 2009

There is hydrogen and helium,
then lithium, berilium,
boron, carbon, nitrogen
and oxygen (a gas).
There’s fluoride, neon, sodium,
a metal called “magnesium,”
another: “aluminium”
and silicon makes glass.
Phosphorus is poisonous
and sulphur is malodorous.
Chlorine keeps pools clean for us.
We use argon in lights.
Nineteenth comes potassium
and twentieth is calcium.
There’s over ninety more of ‘em,
too many to recite.

.
You’ll find their names all written in
The Periodic Table.
I’ve listed twenty, to begin.
Learn more if you are able!

.

Paul Hughes 2009