Henrietta Leavitt Reads An Astronomical Glass Plate Negative
by Brian Evans-Jones
(Harvard, 1903)
Midwinter—the day cold, her fingers cold,
cold the room where she angles glass
to throw what light the low sun shares
onto these black stars—blotched on white
like speckles on an egg, a void
from which knowledge might hatch—but she
is fumbling, fumbling,
her fingers stiff, her reach so short—
she will try, she will scratch letters, lines,
to make God’s cosmic camouflage
mean something—Ah, says God,
staring up through the glass’s hard eye—
you are wrong, you are always wrong—
still her hand moves, just a little
less wrong than yesterday
Brian Evans-Jones is a poet and teacher from Britain, now living in New Hampshire. His poems are published or forthcoming in The Inflectionist Review, Cloudbank, The Café Review, Biscuit Hill, The Shore, and other journals. He won the 2017 Maureen Egen Award from Poets & Writers and was Poet Laureate of Hampshire, UK, in 2012–13. He teaches poetry online at The Poetry Place.