“It’s so much more a thing of pliancy, persuasion,” the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson wrote in her spare, lovely poem celebrating the genius of Einstein’s theory of relativity — genius at the heart of which was his bold and, at the time, countercultural decision to fix the speed of light as an immutable constant around which all the other variables converged to construct his groundbreaking model of spacetime, which revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

The speed of light and the vibrating mesh of our understanding and misunderstanding of the nature of reality come alive with uncommon originality of thought and feeling in the title poem from Marilyn Nelson’s 2012 poetry collection Faster Than Light (public library), which she read at the third annual Universe in Verse. It is a long poem, a beautiful and poignant poem, a soaring, meandering meditation on the nature of reality, the purpose of our existence, the way in which our impermanence both frustrates and fuels our creative drive. Enjoy:

My poems: a handful of dust
trying to get back to supernova.
Like every longing, everything alive.

How lovely, too, that Nelson’s altogether magnificent Faster Than Light opens with the perfect tryptic of epigraphs, straddling two and a half millennia of culture at the boundaries of science, philosophy, art, and activism:

For other highlights from The Universe in Verse, savor U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith reading her ode to the Hubble Space Telescope, astrophysicist Janna Levin reading Maya Angelou’s cosmic clarion call to humanity, Amanda Palmer reading Neil Gaiman’s tribute to Rachel Carson, poet Marie Howe reading her stirring homage to Stephen Hawking, and Rosanne Cash reading Adrienne Rich’s tribute to Marie Curie.