The kids whose siblings lived minded it more;
they objected to matter loosely packed, to the molecule
more Calder mobile than puddingstone.

Or at least they marveled less how like a sun
a marble nucleus could ordain BBs for Bohr’s orbits.

I am not faulting them: what we want before grief
is to contain no absence; before grief we cannot guess
how much rides on the symmetry of heaven
and earth.

. . .

The kids whose siblings lived—
when they traced the textbook lacework of starches,
they felt only hunger; when they stared at the airy jumble
of a polymer like a fistful of unmatched jacks,
it was a reflex to test the desk’s composite, to knock
and so surprise the world in its swiss density.

I am not mocking them, the uninitiated,
for being bewildered on learning these strange things:
how electrons that hula nuclei do not give,
how rapping on emptiness smarts.

Jane Zwart

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