October 15, 2024
1 min read
Poem: ‘Alfred Wegener to the World’
Science in meter and verse
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Edited by Dava Sobel
And yet it moves! Shh—hear the mountains murmur?
Peripatetic prairies slowly creep
across the globe. There is no terra firma.
Is that so terra-ble? We’ll have to keep
producing new and updated editions
of every atlas. But it’s no one’s fault
that continents collide, or split in fissions.
On groaning sleds of granite and basalt,
coastlines advance on trans-oceanic missions
like runners in the world’s most boring race
(though slow, they never fail to cover ground)
and somehow, still, their clip exceeds the pace
a stubborn academic comes around
to evidence, and changes his positions.
Author’s note: Wegener was an early proponent of continental drift—a theory initially met with resistance.
