Science  Write  Now

‘[82] Lead’ first appeared in Sarah Holland-Batt (ed.), Island Magazine 153 (June 2018) and was the featured poem in Holland-Batt’s column in the Weekend Australian’s Arts Review of 3 April 2020: ‘Of poetry and biochemistry’. It also appeared in Tricia Dearborn's Autobiochemistry (UWAP, 2019).

Inorganic chemistry lab. A rack of test tubes

filled with colourless solutions.

Drops of another transparent liquid added.

In each tube, something new appears:

a precipitate, an insoluble solid,

which may be crystalline, curdy, colloidal;

may float as a flocculent mass, or plummet

brightly coloured to the bottom.

I was blind to my feelings for my friend.

One drunken night recognition bloomed.                  

Add a drop of lead nitrate to potassium iodide:

a canary bursts forth from a clear sky.