When Walking on a Slow Ascending Street

Ian Shaw

This feeling, fine-spun, cryptic, ill-defined.
Disquieted unknowing fills their silence,
dull depths unmined.
Yet scientist and poet in strange alliance
welcome this unease with unvoiced violence -
long for sudden certainties through wilderness,
to love both law and lore with tenderness.

When do ideas in sudden clouds arise,
condense, suffuse into those steadfast rains that
all thoughts baptise?
When watching spinning clothes in laundromat,
or listening to Ella’s urbane scat.
When papering a wall, or kneading dough,
or hearing spoken rhythms in Guangzhou.

Out of such windblown puzzles one man knew
that moon and apples act in sympathy.
One finds anew
in spots of time a serendipity,
the poet’s footfall of epiphany.
They sense no more disjoint exchanges
but sudden kinship of once distant strangers.

Though while such worlds I would not disenchant,
is it by thinking on it all the time -
and not by scant -
that paradigm and poem both find rhyme?
They mistime not nor perpetrate a crime
who in yet mining wish for sense not fracked,
or seek for each a place that may be mapped.

The Science

Writers in diverse fields of science and creative writing have both reflected on the creative act and its relation to their work. The title of this poem takes a phrase reflected on by Max Weber, the social theorist, in an essay on science as a vocation. This rhyme royal poem falls within that domain.

The Poet

Ian Shaw is a social scientist living most of the time North of York in the UK. Some of his poetry bridges creative writing and social science. You can read more of Ian’s writing at his Amazon homepage. 

Next poem: Witches’ hats and ballerinas by Rebecca Gethin