You there, yes, you,
checking out your hairdo
with your books begging to the opened
or your totes from Thomas’
cutting across this triskeled campus,
teacher or seeker or refugee looking for a rest
along the rocky road of resistance,
stand still for a moment and see beyond yourself,
your day, your demands, beyond all these fleeting reflections,
stand here, in the stillness of our spinning space
and see Einstein’s apple orbiting all that has now become known as Nobel,
in the almost saturated silence listen out to the whispers
that first became wit and then became wonder,
that gave Walton reasons to ponder.
See multiples of yourselves
in these spheres as singular blocks
building on our ability to be better beings,
to give more meaning to all this matter, here,
in these courtyards of conversations
housing halls now held in high esteem.
Can you see, within these curves of light leaning,
along these lines of longitude cutting through latitudes,
the circles through which we navigate,
the atoms, the Adams, the objects,
the Eves, the masses pushing outwards,
the energy pressing inwards, the people passing on.
Stop, for a moment and release all that you were
and make a place for all that you will become.

The atoms came first and then we bit into the apple.
I wonder if it made us any brighter, lighter?
When you look into these globes, do you see a reflection
of all our energy or is it a projection of what is still to come?

All words by Damien B. Donnelly

Photograph taken from the internet of Apples and Atoms, a sculpture by Eilís O’Connell at Trinity College, Dublin, commemorating Ernest T S Walton (1903-95), physicist and Nobel laureate and the first person in history to artificially split the atom.