Detergent Dreams

Surface tension Third dimension Imperfect sphere Rays interfere Spectral contours Numbers ensure Hydroxide base Light interface Occam's cutlass Logic's numbness Can not destroy Our childish joy Ever humble Soap sud bubble Magical wide eyed wonder Capturing a father's heart Blowing bubbles Soapy sorcery Daughter's delight Laughing Must hold Must keep Must treasure He stayed her tiny hands These are our dreams You cannot destroy them Look how hope carries them high The large ones wobble Then pop under their own weight The small ones float longer Simple and sensible None last forever Don't cry There are always more bubbles Look how they touch Some pull apart They burst Some pull together They grow See the rainbow colours? There's a pot of gold at the end And all the bubbles float upwards To make a castle in the sky Out of our dreams But daddy Soap bubbles are spheres And have no ends And no pots of gold And castles belong on the ground And they're made of stone And not of dreams Silly daddy He looked at his daughter And wondered where the years went Her childhood an ephemeral existence Of a bubble The soap had run out And she had grown up As we all must Entry to "utopia and the soap bubble" contest Written 6th March 2017 Notes: Soap typically contains either sodium hydroxide (caustic soda) or potassium hydroxide "Occam's cutlass" is a reference to Occam's razor - the principle that the simplest explanation is often the correct one