Lie down, you are horizontal
Stand up, you are not
Which way is up?
The man in the lift,
its cable severed,
spends his last moments
as an astronaut,
directionless
a falling man.
Which is which?
Floating in space
or falling freely?
Einstein pondered
their equivalence
ending up (or down?)
with rubber sheets
and gravitation.
The astronaut salutes
and, as reaction
follows action,
performs a slow rotation
before terrestrial matter,
without a single thought,
gets in the way.
I really like this, Martin. On the face of it simple and amusing but with more going on under the surface. Could it be tightened up here and there? Lose the last line of the first stanza? Lose ‘in space’ in the second? Super first day poem!