Cogito Ergo Sum Poem by William B. Watterson

(Galileo Galilei, from Arcetri,1638)

My telescope astounded and amazed.
The moons of Jupiter I viewed and knew
That farther I had seen than any man
Before. Pope Urban, awed by my perceptive
Prowess in astronomy, praised my
Inquisitive and investigative bent.
My 'Dialogues' the scientific world
Received with openness and lauded all
My wit and logic. And even censors
Gave the needed stamp of sanction.

With men of greatness I conversed and met.
They sought me out and spread my work abroad
Like fertile seeds that ride upon the wind,
To lodge, and sprout, and rise to grow again
In a vast diaspora of fecund germination.
To stop the truth? One may as well assay
To tame the tides, or still a plunging cataract,
Suppress the stars that nightly thrum with the
Deep mysterious music of the spheres.

Why, then, cannot the Church admit the earth
Revolves about the sun, that Aristotle, Ptolemy,
And those whose geocentric claims have missed
The mark stand sorely wrong? Heliocentric
Heresy the Inquisition vowed
I favored, so here I languish in Arcetri,
A man confined to die in my own home.
'And yet it moves, ' they swore they heard me say.

Devout and worthy all my life, I now
Am blind and past three score and ten,
Like Oedipus, an outcast in my native
Land, my loved ones all quite lost to me:
Virginia dead, and Livia sequestered still;
Vincenzio, my only son, musician, protégé,
A stranger to me now; my brother Michelangelo
Perished in the plague, to me long gone.

And what, I ask, can now be left for me,
Bereft, blind, infirm, an exile in my villa,
Sight stolen by whatever whims of fate
Control men's destinies, my body broken
And bowed by age, my freedom purloined
By those who deem God's Truth anathema?

But instinct yet compels me to declare
The mind is its own place, and in my soul
I soar above this crushed and shattered frame
To heights as yet unknown to mortal men,
Where even eagles do not dare to fly.