Poem
John McCullough
KNOWN LIGHT
KNOWN LIGHT
KNOWN LIGHT
Now you’re crossing that ocean, I have to confessI’ve rather warmed to this shed where nothing is yours,
where your father found God in a Bunsen flame.
Chipped oak, a gas tap, scores of powdered specimens —
the perfect stage for resurrecting my A-level chemistry.
I remember this much:
a Nichrome wire dipped in compounds then in fire
bares their truer colours.
It’s a bit like those stars,
the ones you rehearsed on the pebbles at Kemp Town:
the blood in Betelgeuse, Rigel’s furtive blue —
they only show under fiercer, more devoted attention;
you have to inspire electrons if you want to unveil
calcium’s brick-red, barium’s green,
the strange lilac which means simply potassium.
Loyal friends, they return now at my diffident prodding,
make me smug as a sorcerer,
impatient for knowledge of the lone unlabelled jar.
Reveal yourself, sweet familiar, I whisper to glass
before I’m blinded by the white heat
of a magnesium heart.
© 2007, John McCulloch
From: Cloudfish
Publisher: Pighog Press, Brighton
From: Cloudfish
Publisher: Pighog Press, Brighton
John McCullough
(United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1978)
John McCullough was born in Watford in 1978 and grew up there during the eighties and nineties. He studied English and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia before completing an MA in Sexual Dissidence at the University of Sussex, followed by a PhD on Shakespeare and friendship. He still teaches creative writing there now, in addition to similar work at the Open University. His ...
Poems
Poems of John McCullough
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KNOWN LIGHT
Now you’re crossing that ocean, I have to confessI’ve rather warmed to this shed where nothing is yours,
where your father found God in a Bunsen flame.
Chipped oak, a gas tap, scores of powdered specimens —
the perfect stage for resurrecting my A-level chemistry.
I remember this much:
a Nichrome wire dipped in compounds then in fire
bares their truer colours.
It’s a bit like those stars,
the ones you rehearsed on the pebbles at Kemp Town:
the blood in Betelgeuse, Rigel’s furtive blue —
they only show under fiercer, more devoted attention;
you have to inspire electrons if you want to unveil
calcium’s brick-red, barium’s green,
the strange lilac which means simply potassium.
Loyal friends, they return now at my diffident prodding,
make me smug as a sorcerer,
impatient for knowledge of the lone unlabelled jar.
Reveal yourself, sweet familiar, I whisper to glass
before I’m blinded by the white heat
of a magnesium heart.
From: Cloudfish
KNOWN LIGHT
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