In Memory
Professor Stephen Hawking
1942-2018

This morning, I struggle with the scientist
who’s died in me. An inner man of infinite surprise,
whose life curtailed and mounted on a jest
of angles, rods, pads, batteries and moving
parts, had come to be the voice of possibility.
But for a lack of mental resolution, maths
and methodology he made physicist my goal.
He set a world that saw itself as split, as one.
Propelled by force beyond beginning and itself
I move through many spaces on the way to work.

Already, he’s a myth beyond the stars. My students
talk of nothing else – the trapped man, freed,
or joke that he may not be dead, but
captive of his chair, eternally. The voice goes
on, beyond – a thousand years they say his work,
those sci-fi robotones he liked and lived behind,
will last. A speck in time for what he taught –
forever – for the man now neurone free.

14.3.2018

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