Lay for the Day 29th February

Anomalies abounding for this day that only appears once every four years. It is the anniversary of the first liquefaction of helium, by a German physicist by the unlikely name of Kammerlingh Onnes. Helium liquefies at a point only just above absolute zero, and even at absolute zero it does not freeze solid. It is a superfluid and flows perpetually, without friction. Little old helium is an intimate relative of all of us, of course, not just because we know it from birthday parties where it keeps the balloons floating up to the ceiling and provides us with the game of breathing it in and squeaking with speeded up voices, but also because it is the fusion of the nuclei of hydrogen atoms into helium atoms which is the fuel of the furnaces of the stars – and the source of energy for all planets and all the life we know.

This must have something to do with my grandmother, who lived to be a hundred and two, and for whose memorial service this poem was written.

Becoming Light

One by one my memories lose their weight.
These few that are heavier – griefs
and fragments of dread
and one, both minute and massive,
that’s the rose-scented globe of an instant
when a child was in a garden
– these depart more slowly
and only after many attempts.

Whether it is a heaven
they have risen into before me
around whose gate they wait
purged and sanctified and stripped of pain,
where they may be robed in white –
whether there is a heaven
I can also no longer remember.
All the ideas have floated off too
that I may once have had of such things.

They are drawn away beyond my reach
in the great gravity of brightness
sucking the sad weight from my memory;
until naked of all but the moments
I wait for the moment
when these last few sounds become silence,
these last few colours sink back
down in the rose-scented globe,
both massive and tiny,
that turns to night and folds its petals
behind me, finally closing me out,
and the scent, weighing nothing,
returns to the day it came from
and is folded once more in the grasp of a child.

I have finished my arduous forgetting.
I am becoming light.

John Gibbens, from Collected Poems

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