Ghosts of Departed Quantities

“And what are these Fluxions? The Velocities of evanescent Increments? And what are these same evanescent Increments? They are neither finite Quantities nor Quantities infinitely small, nor yet nothing. May we not call them the ghosts of departed quantities?”

George Berkeley

As Israel fills the throat of civilization with dust
and the soil with the ocean’s salt
we try to measure that which is lost as a sum
or quantity, a real number. Impossible
as Mahāvīra found, bare feet cool on the red clay
on the knees of the Chamundi Hills
searching for a resolution to Brahmagupta’s error:
that a number remains unchanged when divided by 0.
Impossible, Berkeley cried eight centuries later
to divide something into nothing.

How to measure four year old Ahmed Shabat’s legs
amputated after an Israeli bomb
burst Nuseirat refugee camp, a world wound, 
his home in Beit Hanoun destroyed with his parents 
and fifteen family more?
“Where is my mother? Where is my father?” he asks
over and over, and how will we answer?

How to measure the infants
left to decay in the shell of the bombed hospital
as death pressed down like gravity? Christ in the hay
was not more beautiful than they.

How to measure Khaled Nabhan
kissing the eyes of his granddaughter Reem?
“She is the soul of my soul.”

How to measure the olive trees,
two millennia on fire?

How to measure Refaat Alareer, 
poet of life, who wrote of his death
before he was killed with his brother, his sister,
their four children? 
“If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.”

Let it enter your heart!

Let it enter your heart, mathematician of the world house,
inheritor of the geometry of India, and Baghdad’s House of Wisdom.
Let it enter your heart, sons of Baldwin, that son of America, who knew
“Every bombed village is my hometown.”
Remember algebra itself, born from the Arabicالجبر: “a reunion of broken parts.”
Al-Khwarizmi in his wisdom wrote ilm al-jabr wa'l-muqābala, 
‘the science of restoring what is missing 
and equating like with like.’

“Think not of those who are slain in Allah's way as dead. 
Nay, they live, finding their sustenance 
in the presence of their Lord.
They rejoice in the bounty provided by Allah. 
And with regard to those left behind, who have not yet joined them
in their bliss, the martyrs glory in the fact that on them is no fear,
nor have they cause to grieve.”

Let my life be a witness for the witness.

“She will stay with me,”
Khaled Nabhan says, Reem’s earring glittering
like a tear of gold on his brown palm.
“I will remember her through it.” 

When mathematics fails, how will we measure?
Let it be undefined, but not forgotten.
Let your heart equal mine, let my blood
be that hot quantity which remembers yours.
Let my breath be your breath.
Let your life be that line
which, sacred function, 
approaches infinity forever and ever, amen.