I committed poetry

Tonight at Wiscon was Elise Matthesen's Haiku Earring Party, in which Elise and others make earrings, and people write haiku based upon Elise's names for the earrings.

I chose a pair of earrings that had as a major component an blue bead with several faces in the shape of isosceles triangles. Elise gave me the title "The Gods of Geometry."

I puzzled over it for a few minutes, and realized that the reason it wouldn't resolve itself into a haiku was that it wanted to be a sonnet. Which is all very well, but I've never written a sonnet before. But the shape presented itself to me, and half an hour later, I had a sonnet, such as it is. I blame this all on Isaac Asimov, whose essay on geometry furnished me the relevant facts.

The Gods of Geometry

Four of Euclid's postulates are true
Self-evident for anyone to see
The fifth is not so clear an earthly cue
More difficult to parse for you or me
When Lobachevsky looked on beauty bare
And aspired Eudclid's Fifth to disprove
He found a new world open for him there
Recoiled, a coward, backward went to move
Euclid's Fifth, it seems, is as it claims
A postulate, not iron truth at all
And modern math, with all its fun and games
Sends it to a display niche on the wall
The gods of geometry laugh at human pride
The universe is longer than 'tis wide