Rodd Whelpley
The Thing I Should Have Liked to Ask Stephen Hawking
This was on the tip of my tongue:
Has he never considered the poets, how they –
with their insistence that we've no less days
to sing God's praise than when we'd first begun –
blithely dropped the hammer of infinity,
making every star, every vacuum collapsed
between the twinkles suddenly appear
an arithmetic nail head of forever?
Yes. This. And the bit about ice cream.
Bio
Rodd Whelpley is the secret poet in residence at the Illinois Municipal Electric Agency, where he also runs an electric efficiency program for 33 cities in the state. His poetry is forthcoming in Tinderbox, Spillway and Eunoia Review and has recently been published in such magazines as The Bitchin' Kitsch, One Sentence Poems, Aethlon, Allegro, Antiphon, The Chagrin River Review and Long Dumb Voices. His novel, Capital Murder, appeared in 2001 and disappeared shortly thereafter. Early in the epoch of the disk operating system, he received an MA in creative writing from Miami University.