The Year of Miracles

‘The magnitude of Einstein's departure from the sanctioned belief about light was so unsettling that his particle theory of light was not accepted for two decades.’

He was not thinking of the light bulb
as it batted its last wing.
He had lay in the bath too long -
he was thinking of his rumpled mushroom.

He hadn’t imagined ‘the most revolutionary
sentence written by a physicist’ yet
his hair was still tame, slicked back
dripping into all types of waves.

He was thinking about the sea.
How he lay in cycled litres of it.
He was thinking things he couldn’t see.
The air being slurped up the Plane trees

escaping from it, only to be captured
in his mouth and shunted down the larynx.
It’s long walk through torture chambers
where nothing ever leaves the same.

And in this tub of once-sea water
his beat drilled iambic rhythms
to the enamel, through the plumbing,
throbbing the warning:

You are going to drown if you stay here
to a green shield bug cowering
at the foot of the drainpipe.
This despicable bug to one look

at the sun and laughed, tapping back
with his antennae ‘fat chance’.
This happened for two decades.
Perhaps this is what spurred him on.