Writing from the stemistry lab
‘Through a glass darkly’
by Marilyn Longstaff
You’re not too good at scale,
or maybe it’s imagination
that’s at fault, but you can’t do
extremes of massive/miniscule, see
Swaledale, rather than the universe,
as huge; for tiny, nothing smaller
than a grain of wheat, a speck of dust.
So, scrutinise the latter as you must,
first, with the naked eye, then through
an ever more powerful microscope.
Would you see hills, farms, sheep, cows,
a valley with a river, dry stone walls,
skeletons of chapels, trees, textures,
vivid colours, detailed stratifications?
Or might it be like Swaledale
on a grey November day, in low mist,
infinite and blurred into one, like the
chaos before the world was formed
from a nanospeck in its creator’s eye?