Human Error

God spoke and there was light,
but since I wasn’t there it must have happened
unannounced, the way a tree falling in the forest
unobserved makes no sound, commits no error in its collapse.
Alexander Pope said, “To err is human, to forgive, divine.”
My friends and I scrawled this on our lab reports in physics,
because Mr. Carver always wrote “HUMAN ERROR”
with red ink on our papers. He was not amused.
Nor was God, I suppose, when the Church condemned
Galileo’s heresy of a sun-centered universe.
But Newton believed, daydreaming in formulas
I irreverently botched with my hundred-dollar calculator
and glitter gel pen.
The tilt of the Earth, the pull of the moon,
just the right mix of stardust and sperm—and somehow I slithered
from primordial sludge into public school,
my wet Sketchers squeaking on freshly waxed floors.
All I know of physics are legends and laws:
an object at rest tends to stay at rest
unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
I want to be that force, unbalanced and beautiful,
the tiniest breath of a butterfly’s wing
bringing change to a future written not in stone,
but in sand and sea and clouds.
In a cosmic glance my trials mean nothing;
the grand inquisitors who judged me
for inciting rebellion among believers
during chauvinist sermons and politicized potlucks
banished me from a land I never loved,
from a place I didn’t belong.
After recanting the Earth’s orbit
before a Church court, Galileo reportedly whispered,
“And yet it moves.” I doubt he said this.
Even Galileo feared the flames. I too renounce
my truths again and again, yet still
they stay with me, stuck fast and quick-forgiving.
I’m glad Galileo gave in, imperfect genius that he was.
But alone at night, did he drown his guilt in crimson wine?
Did he rationalize, like I do, that our errors are minor
miscalculations in the eternal human equation?
And did he remind himself that with or without permission,
the revolution goes on?

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Christy Effinger teaches English at a community college in Indianapolis. Her writing has appeared in Southern Indiana Review, Word Riot, elimae, Dark Sky Magazine, All Things Girl, Cezanne’s Carrot, EarthSpeak Magazine, Girls with Insurance, Melusine, and elsewhere.