Celestial Navigation
a three-dimensional universe
icosahedron
suspended from the ceiling
a surge of electricity
orange becomes yellow
casts a bright shadow
a tiger moth is drawn inside
this triangular world
sun bulb at its center
its chitin wings slowly singe
and it burns
in the bliss of incongruence
Three
If my garden of numbers
grew in arithmetical series
then beyond the lawn
would be geometric
my pink pencil would fill
space with paper roses
clematis would climb
the lover's arch
bounded by thistles
we would grow
away then together
graft each onto the other
thistle clematis rose
assisted reproduction
a child with three parents
The Law of Statistics
for Sally Clark 1964 – 2007
You, Sally Clark, solicitor,
discover your son, Christopher
dead in his Moses basket. Harry, born
a year later, dies in his bouncy chair.
Pediatrician for the Crown,
Sir Roy Meadow, tells the jury
two cot deaths in the same family
would occur only once in a century.
Odds are one in seventy-three million,
lower than the lottery, beyond all
reasonable doubt. An easy decision:
You must be guilty.
At Styal Prison, the horde screams,
Here's the nonce! Die woman, die!
They bang on the door, clamber up,
gawp as you cringe in a holding cell.
At the second appeal, your body
is free but your mind has crumpled.
You drink until you die,
your third son, left without a mother.
I tell this story to my medical students,
show death by natural causes
was more likely than murder.
Silence
Art Information
- “A Touch of Yellow” © Elizabeth Konkel; used by permission.
- “Unfolded Icosahedrons” © dodeckahedron; Creative Commons license.
Eveline Pye was an operational research analyst in the Zambian Copper Industry, before lecturing in statistics at Glasgow Caledonian University for 22 years. Her statistical poetry was featured in Significance, the joint magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association in their Life in Statistics series. Her poems appear in the Bridges 2013 Poetry Anthology (in the “Enschede” section, Tesselations Publishing). A collection about Zambia, Smoke that Thunders, was published by Mariscat Press in 2015.
