Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

  Lend me your ears A poet is a person who is able to stop and listen enabled to pause long enough to sense the world to make some sense of it and share the contemplation about these feelings with another also willing to pause Poetry is intimate  a dance for two two who breathe in and breathe out together for a little while without regard  for the arrow of time The poem lies dormant  until the moment it is shared it's flame reignited the candle burning bright if only for that moment until it brings light again The poem will wait patiently  for those too busy to pause until the time is right for it's moment in the sun and the poet and a listener once again are one Aubrey Lieberman 2/26/23

  Homeostasis At the most atavistic level, life entails reliable metabolism, maintenance of structural integrity and reproductive predictability. Without the input of energy, in the broadest sense, everything will crumble into constituent elements until state of equilibrium is achieved, at a temperature of absolute zero. The word entropy was introduced into our vocabulary about 150 years ago to depict this process. Life is enthalpic, a term coined about 50 years later, to describe a system in which order is increasing and heat rising. Entropy is the bow which propels the arrow of time in the direction we experience it in the macroscopic world.  In the beginning, life is massively enthalpic, but soon aligns with entropy, so organisms live first and die later. Energy must be added to the system continuously over time to balance the vital equation that enables life in the biosphere in the long now. The star at the core of all of the life we know is the sun, which we expect to be ...

  Never mind How would a god create a universe Back then there were no Cambridges and Oxfords Harvards and MIT's Caltechs and Stanfords Sorbonnes and Copenhagens Plancks    and Leidens This god would have to have been the polymath of polymaths with multiple doctorates in every imaginable field and a master of all technologies necessary to institute any and all feasible plans But none of the knowledge to fill such a mind would have been available at the beginning of time The idea that evolution is a mindless phenomenon is far easier to comprehend and thus truly awesome at the highest level of immensity that a word is capable of conveying Aubrey Lieberman 2/9/23

  Pity the old poets Poets have much more to write about now than they ever did before Knowledge is abundant and access to it greater than it ever was before The audience is vast literacy widespread access greater than ever before Unlike the explorers of old all of us have seen more places than people ever did before  We can hear more great music and see more great art than we ever could before So should we pity the old poets Of course not Awe was as boundless then as it is now It has always surrounded us even when we are oblivious It is a product of our brains but even before we knew that we needed it to survive Aubrey Lieberman 2/8/23

  Royalty The British astronomer royal the astrophysicist Baron Martin Rees and the musician singer and songwriter Sir Paul McCartney were born in England during the second world war  the children of ordinary families in the common era in 1942 They became extraordinary people in apparently disparate fields but united in the realm they share Their nobility is well deserved We salute them for guiding us into the dimension called awe Aubrey Lieberman 2/9/23

  Gatekeepers Poets are guardians of gateways to awe Aubrey Lieberman 2/6/23

  Why are we here? With an infrared telescope well outside the earth's atmosphere, we can see the light that was produced at the beginning of time in our now expanding universe, a place without edges, all boundaries distorted by the curvature of spacetime, the inflation of which is driven by the dark energy which we are struggling to understand. We are able to think about the beginning of time by imagining all of the energy that is our universe now gravitationally contained in a relatively tiny space. This is where the laws of physics as we understand them cease to make sense, although we are able to contemplate, to try to imagine how things might work, beyond that boundary. So, at the most fundamental level, we don't know why we are in this universe, or in one of many others. At the beginning of time there were no molecules. They appeared as the system cooled and chemistry began, creating lumps in an otherwise amorphous plasma, and gravity sculpted stars and galaxies, asteroid...