In keeping with the tradition of spacing out the year-end list with guest posts, I have taken the perhaps unusual (for a music blog) step of commissioning a poem. But then Nialler9 did once say this blog took music “as serious as most scholars take James Joyce” in the top selling daily newspaper in Ireland, so here we are. This is by Conor Leahy, who edits Icarus, the literary magazine in Trinity College Dublin, and it relates to the third most important thing that happened this year after Stressmatic doing a Slick Rick impression on Rear View Mirror and Dublin winning the All-Ireland. Neutrinos being faster than it was previously thought possible for anything in the universe to be, that is.
Proceedings at CERN, 2011
Lend me the apparatus to esteem
This addle gumbo split – from the outside
In, to itemise each piece of air
And calibrate the function of the murk.
In all manner of things is intermingled time,
Lest from the soil one see a cow coa-
Lesce, or, hatching from the sky, a bird.
But this is an invitation to disprove
That a swerving, here, of my limbs to life
Occurred a bit before my having willed it
The CERN news today had me skipping back to Conor’s clever poem
this is better than your one off the roots albums