Click on the Play Button to hear a reading of this poem:
Stop and Wonder
To allow us to stop and wonder,
Whitehead, in words concise,
Says, “No thinker thinks twice,”
And then asks us this to ponder.
It may put your mind in quandar
And is neither here nor yonder,
But frosty fire, incendiary ice,
Quantumicity, a roll of the dice.
* * *
Note: “The ancient doctrine that ‘no one crosses the same river twice’ is extended. No thinker thinks twice; and, to put the matter more generally, no subject experiences twice. This is what Locke ought to have meant by his doctrine of time as a perpetual perishing. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 29.
—HyC
“Stop and Wonder” is one of 81 poems in my new book The Logic of Rhyme, available on Amazon.