“On Visible Light” is a villanelle, defined by the Academy of American Poets as a highly structured poem made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains.
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Knowledge is the fruiting body of light, and light the fruiting body of photons at the end of traveling through our nights
to reach the velvet chair, the common snipe, where we see that in an object's reflection, knowledge is the fruiting body of light.
Just a slice of electromagnetic wavelength and sight is ours, a blindness gone at the end of traveling through our nights.
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All this way and yet something's not right. This blue color we see is the chair's rejection. Knowledge is the fruiting body of light
whose shadows dog us. Might this be the heart of why we fail to reach satisfaction at the end of traveling through our nights.
Always wanting what is beyond our sight, always drawn toward the parts still hidden. Knowledge is the fruiting body of light at the end of traveling through our nights.
Edited by Dava Sobel
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