All of us who saw it from the ground
testified
It was the tortoise that fell and killed
Aeschylus.
So Christ, Socrates, Galileo
were killed, too.
We, the groundlings who witnessed their deaths,
swear to you
It was the tortoise each time. It fell
from the air.
Some say eagles, by letting them fall.
But who knows?
I watched his clay flesh
take its changing form from thought
And fling the fiction
of his birth-by-chance to scorn.
Science, he would say,
is another way of life...
Without a flutter
or doubt to betray his eyes.