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MCC Daily Tribune Archive

President's Wednesday Message


It’s break week, and April is National Poetry Month, and Neil deGrasse Tyson will be visiting MCC soon, and we could all use a vision of a world with “trees, marshes, deserts, grasses, rivers and seas” rather than one of cold, grey, snowy days. So, for all of these reasons, I share with you today a poem by Hester Knibbe, a Dutch poet who began her career as a clinical pharmaceutical analyst. The power of observation that Ms. Knibbe picked up the laboratory serve her well in conjuring the beauty in the stars and our place within it.

Light-years

by Hester Knibbe
(translated by Jacquelyn Pope)

It’s a beautiful world, you said,
with these trees, marshes, deserts,
grasses, rivers and seas

and so on. And the moon is really something
in its circuits
of relative radiance. Include

the wingèd M, voluptuous
Venus, hotheaded Mars, that lucky devil
J and cranky Saturn, of course, plus

U and N and the wanderer P, in short
the whole solar family, complete with its
Milky Way, and count up all the other

systems with dots and spots and in
that endless emptiness what you’ve got
is a commotion of you-know-what. It’s a beautiful

universe, you said, just take a good look
through the desert’s dark glasses
for instance or on your back

in seas of grass, take a good look
at the deluge of that Rorschach—we’re standing out there
somewhere, together.


What poem captured your interest this month? Please share it on the blog.

Anne M. Kress
Office of the President
04/16/2014