Poetry Thursday: Mathematics

Mathematics

Age 5, he knew what Y should equal.
Instinct, or the X that was his father,
(the accountant) gave him a certainty.

I thought it was wrong –
setting a question like that to my baby –
until he answered, unerringly.

He wanted more.
More of those X and Y puzzles.
It was as amusing as a two-year old

who could say Pterodactyl
or name olives in Arabic. My boy
the mathematician.

And when we told him
we were dividing the sum of us,
back into its constituent parts,

My single self and his father’s:
he knew then, as he always had,
that nothing would be lost.

He holds the A, the B, the C
of us, carries it on, adds his own numbers,
Headed towards infinity.

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I wouldn't have believed that I could write a poem with Maths as a theme. I didn't do exactly what Poetry Thursday asked of us, but it's something. If you want to find some equations and poetic proofs go HERE