Thursday, November 5, 2015

My Agony, My Ecstasy


Mathematics was a friend;
we’d stroll down corridors
together, not arm-in-arm
but chatting, distant comrades.
We sat next to each other
in classrooms, enduring the best
and the worst each school
had to offer,

until, trusting my friend,
I followed him into the surrealism
of geometry, a forest of crystal trees
with jagged edges tearing
at my flesh, my mind, and flashing
lights of what was claimed to be logic,
demanding tattoos of proof and theorem.

I escaped, bare and barely,
to the warm embrace of algebra
and its fraternal twin trigonometry,
my mind clearing, order restored
as I danced with equations, flirted
with sines and co-sines, still
shuddering at what I’d left behind.

Mathematics was my agony.
Mathematics was my ecstasy.


This month at Tweetspeak Poetry, the featured poetry prompts are based on math, science, and technology. See the post for more poems. I’m sure there are at least two people who liked geometry.


Illustration: The Theorem of Pythagoras, colorized by Dany Jack Mercier via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

1 comment:

Joy Lenton said...

What a unique take on a topic. I love this one, Glynn! Although mathematics has never really been my friend. He gets a bit antsy with me at times. Or maybe I do with him! ��