Scientists have been taking pictures of hydrogen atoms. Or looking at them, anyway, using imaging technology – it’s not really photography at this level, but I assume these false color images are based on data being collected, which makes them pictures at some level of abstraction – they’re graphs of what the atoms and their electron clouds look like. Let’s not forget that a photograph is a photograph – a graph of light.
VI. The Stare's Nest by My Window
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in he empty house of the stare.A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More Substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.– William Butler Yeats (part 6 from a 1923 longer poem "Meditations in time of Civil War").
Note that the word "stare" here is an Irishism for the bird called starling, I think. And the civil war in question is the Irish war for independence from the UK.
I really like this poem. It combines something deep and symbolic with a very immediate observation of nature in the moment.
