Poem of the Week: “Newton’s Apple” by Harry Clifton

“Master Isaac Newton in His Garden at Woolsthorpe, in the Autumn of 1665” by Robert Hannah

Harry Clifton’s “Newton’s Apple” illuminates the evolving world in the setting of a cyber-café. The poem highlights the demand for constant increases in knowledge and the ways in which we gain that knowledge. Clifton also questions the connection between growth and individual priorities.

Newton’s Apple

You return, bewildered,
To a world where everyone is always young
And you alone have aged.

‘Mass into energy, energy back into mass’
A student theorises to his girlfriend
Over Danish pastries, at a neighbouring table, 

‘And, of course, the question of time
And its reversal…’
                                 Twenty
You would guess, the pair of them, 

Like everyone else in the cyber-café,
Its blizzard of information
On-line, except for yourself the revenant 

From the other side of the sky.
A slice off Newton’s apple. Perfect knowledge.
Here they are eating it though, not watching it fall.

–Harry Clifton, from Secular Eden (2007)