Southern Cemetery #4: David Martin

Among the many graves in Southern Cemetery this must be one of the strangest, and if an English equivalent of André Blavier's Les Fous littéraires existed it would surely merit a place in it. David Martin was a labourer and amateur scientist who was convinced that Leibnitz was right and Newton wrong, and that the world had been following the wrong person for three hundred years. However, the media wouldn't listen to him. He therefore resolved to self-publish in a poem his belief that gravity does not exist. The gravestone was prepared more than ten years before his death in 2010.

'Space

After 76 voyages around the sun, I am ready
to assert that space is not inert.
The world through space does not go.
Space carries the world to and fro.
It is the conveyer of our sphere. Be of
good cheer. The truth at last is here.
Let it be said "Gravity is dead." "Newton
was mad." "The people have been had."
God can make a tree – but not gravity.
With smooth effortless grace the super fluid
called space carries our world apace.
We pay no heed to our 20 miles per
second speed because super fluid engineering
at Nature's best makes perpetual
motion seem like rest. With hot stars
and our sun burning and churning,
space is alive and pulsating with energy electrified.
In a whirlpool of space our world
plays its part 93 million miles away
from the sun's boiling bubbling heart.

         David Martin'

My other posts on Southern Cemetery graves:

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The Manchester Sound
L. S. Lowry
Maria Pawlikowska–Jasnorzewska George Ghita Ionescu
John and Enriqueta Rylands
John Cassidy
Jerome Caminada
George Freemantle
Leo Grindon and Rosa Grindon
Eric Thompson