The Scariest Stanza In All Of Poetry Poem by Robert Ronnow

Numerous number systems beyond the real:
complex numbers, octonions, omnions which can eat
      whole black holes.
It's axiomatic that your personal history, preferences,
      how you feel
account for nothing at all.

$30 buys a flock of chickens for a needy family
      (International Rescue Committee)
$29 gets a girl a school uniform (CARE) , for $300 you
      can stock a fish pond (Heifer International)
$69 can start a female entrepreneur in the sewing
      business (Mercy Corps)
$5 will buy a bed net that protects a family from
      mosquitoes (Against Malaria)

20th century experiments demonstrated that electrical
      charge is quantized; that is, it comes in
multiples of individual small units called the elementary
      charge, e, approximately equal to 1.602
x 10-19 coulombs (except for particles called quarks
      which have charges that are multiples of
1/3e) .

Why has the experimentalism of the avant-garde, which
      has failed in the novel, succeeded in
poetry? Because poetry is always experimental; while
      the novel, on the contrary, by its nature,
cannot be... which is to say that experimentalism is
      synonymous with poetry, and that applied
to the novel, it leads simply to the substitution of the
      novel with poetry.    - Alberto Moravia

Man made the town, Fibonacci inflated zero to be the
      wheel
around which the universe turns and language is the soul
walking and talking quietly or going angrily to war.
'Counting is in its very essence magical, if any human
      practice is at all. For numbers are things no one has
      ever seen or heard or touched.' As are words.

Joan Didion thought the scariest stanza in all of
      poetry
begins Row, row, row your boat gently
down the stream. The elements, the material penumbra,
irresolvable for the mortal, readily dissolve in words and
      numbers.



- with lines by Nicholas Kristof, Alberto Moravia and Roy Harris