A Letter from Galileo
The following is a poem that was inspired by the book, Galileo's Daughter which detailed the correspondence of this great astronomer, Galileo, with his devoted and loving daughter, Sister Marie Celeste, a nun living in a convent outside of Florence. Her order followed the practices of St. Francis of Assisi. Galileo's letters to his daughter have been lost to history, probably burned by the convent's Mother Superior, because of Galileo's conviction as a heretic for proposing that the Earth revolved around the Sun. The fear of investigation by the Holy Inquisition has robbed us of Galileo's letters. But in Sister Maria Celeste's correspondence with her father, we get a half of the view into the love and devotion this father and daughter held for one one another. Since Galileo shared many of his ideas and theories with his daughter, I wondered what Galileo would have said at his daughter's postulancy (when she took her vows, comparable to a marriage to Jesus)...