Poem: ‘Love Letter from Photograph 51’

Science in meter and verse

By Faith Paulsen edited by Dava Sobel & Clara Moskowitz

Blue artistic image — Science History Images/Alamy Stock Photo

“[c]learly Rosy had to go or be put in
her place.... The thought could not be
avoided that the best home for a feminist
was in another person’s lab.”
—James D. Watson, The Double Helix (1968)

I am the image, that final clue.
I know only this lab, where light can simmer for days,
coaxing shadows to slowly define
the tiny drop you tip so carefully
onto the end of a twisted paperclip.

The lab, and you, squinting into the lens
of a machine you developed—
hydrogen gas pumped through a salt solution—
on the fulcrum between question and discovery.

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In the lab, the men call you names, mock your clothes,
your moods, your lips, unpainted.

Your delight, your choice of gardenia
is science.

Not on the first but the fifty-first iteration,
I come to you
in the honey of crystallography
amid x-rays splattered off a fiber of wet DNA
like a tadpole on a sliver of glass.

I swim up, rapt, to visibility.
I whisper my secret only to you,
the clue, first word of the organic story.
The ancient code-script
pinned down at last—
The recipe for whale song
and peacock feathers
earlobe and pea plant, X and Y.

I fix my focus in your eyes, Rose Franklin.
I your discovery. You my laureate.

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