THE Sum of Things

Long before man
bound flint to wood
with sharp right-angles;
and before the dinosaurs
paced Earth’s circumference
and knocked trees over
into crude diagonals;
before the molecules
and particles of quantum
physicists began to dance
and God created symmetry
each equinox a perfect
balancing of night and day;
before there were the minds
to think or even words to say
the square of the hypotenuse
was equal to all that;
and pi was 3.14159.

Eleanor Livingstone

If you've any comments on this poem, Eleanor Livingstone would be pleased to hear from you.