The school, sandstone, soot-darkened,
A maze of striplit corridors and chilly stairwells
Drilled through by bells at nine and four,
Is a site of great importance. It should be protected.
It should be blue-plaqued, revered, respected;
For in these classrooms,
The atom was split for the first time.
Each year it was seen to shatter
In the heads of a new batch of fourth-formers; sometimes a neat
divorce
Of one hemisphere from another, sometimes an enormous
Microscopic Hallelujah, shock-headed physicists
Blinking in awe; some girls saw many-petalled
Explosions, protons and neutrons spinning out like beads;
Some saw mercury quivering and scooting away from itself
As it did in the teacher’s demonstration; similarly, Newton’s apple
Shape-shifted: a russet, a Braeburn, a lunchbox Fuji
Tumbling away in the grass as gravity
Appeared like the Cheshire Cat. Four times a week,
We were biologists; we found soft knots of life
In underground pockets, burrowing, burying
A desert wasp’s clutch and guarding it viciously,
Vicariously. Heads down, we followed khakied naturalists
Into a cave in Papua, a whispering cathedral, air dense with bats
And travelled north and west, geographers, noting land use:
Rice paddies, poppies, mangoes, tea; and made our pencilled way
Along the Mekong, learnt Mahayana, Theravada,
Weighed them in our hands, held them like charms. In a
top-floor classroom
We were enlightened, and rising to the edge of space, bore witness to it all.
We were there at the dawn of the nuclear age. We were those scientists
At Los Alamos whose bitter new light bleached the air, who
Melted the ground, stained the sky black with guilt
Like ink from a broken pen, sent tremors through certainty.
Philosophers rose
And fought their corners; the house lights went down, writers entered
Stage left and sang through us. We were Juliet, Antigone;
We acted out the arc of tragedy; we conjured metaphors
In Technicolor; fiction was a never-ending garden; we could see everything.
Our school was a house of dreams, for here
Anything that could be thought was possible; God was
Proved, refuted, revealed, denied; technologically
Blessed, we could reach further into deep space
Than our parents knew existed; not only the Hubble Telescope but
A walk on the beach would reveal Eternity
Billions of times over, and we could see Rome burn,
Troy brought to its knees for Helen, and to the tune
Of the assembly hall’s off-key upright piano, imagine: above us only sky…