Phases of the moon in Pisa, straining his eyes

Night after night, to reconcile Copernicus,

Ptolemy and the Church, trying somehow

To maintain sanity and order in the Universe.

Try, as he might, he couldn't shake the truth

Revealed by his toy-telescope and

Labored calculations...

The truth, disconcerting

To all of Italy, Europe, and beyond..

Think of it! Instead of sunrise and sunset,

We live with a cycle of earthrise and earthset

As our heretofore friendly, stable planet,

Mother Earth, was no longer a steady Rock,

On which to build Christendom and the Holy Church,

But a spinning planet, like so many others in the Milky Way,

Turning, immutably, beneath our feet,

Beneath lordly palaces and temples of worship,

Our earth gripped by gravity to Mother Sun,

Ablaze in a vast overarching sky.

How now, he thought, to exist on this earth

Inexorably tilted, and rotating,

Mindlessly circumnavigating the Sun?

Would mariners and pilgrims,

Philosophers and theologians

Ever feel the same, no longer confident

Of a preordained cosmic orderliness?

Surely, Galileo's head began to swim,

His stance no longer so steady,

His breathing tighter in his chest,

As he imagined the coming heresy,

The inevitable challenge of the True Believers,

When one must renounce Discovery,

Recite the old, comforting dogma,

Trying to ignore growing blindness

And never quite accepting his own

Strange, subtle, unrelenting vertigo,

While Copernicus's earth continued turning

On its own tilted axis.