Cubic

Cubic Palimpsest

Stanza 1 – The Tangible Cube
In a quiet council‑room the square sits,
a block of oak with edges honed to a straight,
quiet — the kind that measures the light‑fall,
colour‑drenched dust in its corners.
The grains, all in a tidy, fascinate order,
each face equal to the others, a quiet sing‑song
of symmetry, paid for by labour and patience;
the cube knows no hierarchy, no uneven turn.

Stanza 2 – The Metre of Volume
Cubic metre, the sovereign unit that waves the ruler:
from the floor racks to the ceaseless whale‑bodies,
it is the language of rooms, the dialect of ships,
the abstract where space assumes a unit clause.
In a hall, a single cubic metre is the volume of a breath,
no more, no less: a sentence in distance.
The cube holds breath, the room holds breath,
they both exist in the same octave of space.

Stanza 3 – The Cubic Programme of Numbers
Turn, turn, the thought to the graph, see the loop:
x³ + ax² + bx + c = 0, a riddle, a poem’s chase;
the cubic root, a whisper of a root that splits
the cubic into two truths, emblematic of dream and dread.
The algebraic box is a box on paper,
a mooring in a sea of variables, where the roots make bijections
that can only be captured by a hand that counts,
in a crowd that is only a few.

Stanza 4 – Consequence and Consecration
Cubic is more than geometry; it is a mind’s temple,
a sphere of faith in measurement, in flux that does not tumble.
It is the hollow inside a diamond that catches the sun,
the cathedral of scaffolding, where numbers meet the run.
In the quiet of a cube, there is a secret teaching:
balance matters—no corner is higher, no face is lesser,
and in that balance we find a proof of our own existence:
a measure of life itself, ever—and ever—cubic.