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Fifth grade science:
            for Giana at the winter solstice

George Perreault

You might think of science as lists,
a few things we’ve found out and
then committed to memory, but
science is older than lists,
older even than writing.

Science is not really a catalog of
stuff we’ve learned, it’s a way of
studying what might be true and then
seeing if this next piece will help us
get a better handle on the world.

Take today’s excitement that school is
out, all these gifts and wishes given at the
darkest hour because tomorrow promises
just a sliver more sun and then another,
day after day into summer.

Can you even imagine, centuries ago
around our paltry fires, the moon on its
slow rounds through an endless night of
placid stars and wandering planets, how we
tracked them coming and going,

debated their stories and their meanings for
thousands of years, and how our precious
science is only one of those stories – let’s say 
our home is a chunk of rock and water circling
a star, and we lean toward or away

as we go around, sometimes bathing in more
light and sometimes less, a journey we need
to chart if we hope to plant and harvest enough
to see our tribe through the winter (and our tribe
is everyone ever and still to come).

So we celebrate today what we have scienced –
that tomorrow may be colder, but ahead there is
more sun while the earth slowly warms, as it
always has, into fruit and flowers and fuzzy
animals playing together in the long grass.

This story was ancient before we knew the nature of
our star, when knowledge was a few rocks stood up
in a field, but – listen – five thousand years ago, part
of our tribe built calendars in the jungle that could
predict every solar eclipse forgotten or far ahead.

Think about that – five thousand years ago we
already knew last October’s eclipse, that it was
written in stone how a shadow would slide like a
jaguar across the sun, and the exact day it happens
again and again for a hundred thousand years.

This is the science story that we teach like a prayer –
how we breathe in and then breathe out – how we sing
and are sung to – a darkness comes, but then there is
light – a hard darkness, maybe, and cold, but then, yes,
child, there is light – there is always more light. 

George Perreault has published five full-length collections, most recently Lie Down as You Were Born. He is the winner of the inaugural Charles Simic Poetry Prize. Perreault has lived in Reno since 1999.