March 18, 2018Questions for Stephen Hawking
Do you still believe it’s intelligent life we ought to avoid?
This is a silent poem. Every letter
is silent, every word is silent, every
line is silent, every stanza is silent.
Even the stanza breaks are silent.
Are poets as useless as philosophers?
This is a silent painting. Since you
don’t know what you could be missing,
you don’t know what you could see.
That’s what silence is.
Do black holes take library books?
Maybe they’ve taken all of the noise
from the silent letters. Maybe they’ve
taken the library books. Maybe they’ve
taken heaven from atheists.
Are atheists afraid of the dark?
This is a poem for people afraid of
the light, afraid of the silence of the dark.
Fairy tales were made to terrify, not
comfort.
If a robot asks me out, do I say yes?
In the future there may be silent
roosters, and nobody will know
what they’re missing.
A silent man seems attractive,
in the meantime.
If the elephant in the room dies, do you have a funeral?
This is not a protest poem. It’s just
an image. It’s just the silence that
occurs between neurons firing,
putting what was upside-down
right-side up. You can only protest
death once it’s already in the room,
taking up all the silent space.
If we meet in heaven will you avoid me? Will you declare it all a bad dream or a good dream? Will we drink rum and coke or virtue?
Happily ever after was only
a mutation.
Will you take a look at my theory of nothing?
That’s okay, it was the silence
I was after.
from Poets Respond