Waking From Sleep to Dream

“The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it,
and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes
as though it had nothing else in the Universe to do.~~”Galileo Galilei

Waking From Sleep to Dream

~1609~
Improving the unseen invention of another,
working with his brain and third hand descriptions,
he played with alternating lenses,
focusing on solutions; not problems.
Polishing desire, pushing beyond the curve and
magnifying thirty times the yet unseen,
Galileo Galilei
lifted us from Aristotelian sleep
and let us dream of possibilities.


Turning vision from sea to sky,
more intimate view of that 'star to steer:'
he saw where none had truly looked before.
The moon, no flattened sphere
but rife with mountains and craters.
Beyond the moon to Jupiter,
watching, calculating intervals,
identified four moons encircling
the behemoth planet.

He looked deeper, proved
we were not the center of the universe
but an infinitely minute part of something far bigger
than previously imagined.

~1632~
Independent thought,
proven, established as fact,
raised the ire of church and Pope.
Was he so far seeing that he could dispute
The Word of God?
Postulating, believing, that the sun was
"the center… not moving from place to place…
absurd and false –
expressly contrary to Holy Scripture.”*
Everyone knew the earth was the center of the universe;
How could it be otherwise?
In church-centric fashion,
they blindly
condemned him as
"vehemently suspect of heresy"*
Galileo recanted, quietly whispering,
"Epur si muove“**
For while he believed Bible couldn’t be wrong,
He had less faith in the interpreters
and the Inquisition
was not interested in the truth.

~1992~
Some three hundred years
after Galileo was interred,
left in the unconsecrated ground
of the damned,
and three years after
the Galileo spacecraft was launched
‘from the shuttle Atlantis
on its journey to Jupiter,
the Church finally revoked their
condemnation of Galileo.

* http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/galileo/condemnation.html
**Yet it moves.