Discovery
by and published in Edition Three of Pomegranate
While you’ve called me up, I suppose
you’ll be just desperate to know
how I feel the subjects we dreamed up
turned out. Well, to start with,
what’s with all the mindless praise
for Copernicus? His system (with
its Greek name enduring),
so much the big achievement
of modern European science,
had a precedent, I hope
you realise – a precedent
in my beloved Samos, which many thought
the centre of the universe, except
the one-and-only Aristarchus,
although I loved the place.
I know you scoff at us: how easy
it must have been, how pathetic
to claim credit for the basics
your ten-year-olds can understand, how
we had our pick of subjects to advance
while your every innovation
was known a thousand years before,
but we had to discover subjects, before ‘discovery’
could even begin to be a word.
Ben Davison
Ben Davison is twenty-two and lives in Glasgow. He has a poem forthcoming in The New Writer and was a runner-up in a recent competition held by Envoi magazine. Ben’s dad keeps typing his name into Google and finding his poems. This is very annoying.