Each month, the San Francisco Public Library Web site, www.sfpl.org, will feature selected poems reflecting the theme of War and Peace on Our Streets.
To submit a poem or for more information about the project, see our News Release.
San Francisco Chronicle October Featured Poet:
Jennifer Arin
Jennifer Arin is editor of Transformations, an anthology or poetry and art, and is one of the writers featured in the poetry chapbook Tangle Vine. Her poems and essays have been published in
both the U.S. and in Europe, winning international awards. She also is co-translator, with the author, of The Adoption of the Gold Standard in Mexico, and has received several grants, including one from the National Endowment
for the Humanities, Poets & Writers Writers On Site Residency, and a PEN Writer’s Fund Grant. Ms. Arin currently teaches in the English department at San Francisco State University.
Unified Theory
by Jennifer Arin
This is our place: to understand
how matter fits together.
In the beginning there was nowhere
that was not open, filled only
with energy vibrating
towards the center
of one condensed sphere.
Then the sphere split apart.
Perhaps an earlier
collapsed universe was ready
to rebound, or a quantum
fluctuation caused the rupture.
No one knows why,
though we discovered
all galaxies in observable space recede
from ours.
This break created
scattered stars, and our ideas
of separateness and force.
In ancient Greece, they understood
multiplicity, mere appearances
of a single truth.
It is our place to remember
that the many stem from one.
There is no place
not ours
to hold together.
