Sarah Barber

How to Talk about Particles

I want them to be visible—
like the forms of water
as it hangs in air, as mist and drizzle
and spontaneous frost
in overnight generation on all that is
leafed and seeded, each floweret,
stemmed or stalked—
            as I want the wasp,
three weeks at dying
in the sink’s white bowl, to imagine
granular snow or far patterns of stars,
to think now, now do I not deserve
to accomplish some great purpose?—

But the work of particles
is not glamorous.

A Note on the Poem: Thanks to Munir Pirbhai for noting that “the work of particles is not glamourous”. It is Mary Shelley’s seafarer Robert Walton who asks, just before meeting Victor Frankenstein on the ice, “And now, dear Margaret, do I not deserve to accomplish some great purpose? My life might have been passed in ease and luxury, but I preferred glory to every enticement that wealth placed in my path.”

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Sarah Barber is author of Country House, winner of the 2017 Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and The Kissing Party, published in 2010 by the National Poetry Review Press. Her poems appear widely and she teaches at St. Lawrence University in Canton, NY.