There are 430 different meanings to the word set in the Greater Oxford Dictionary. I’ve not quite used all of them in the poem below.
All Set
My brother and I had a set-to.
I’ll set the scene:
He was about to set out on a badger hunt
With his Irish setter, Seth,
Planning to set on the beast after dark.
The badger sett was in a woodland glade,
A lovely place, fit for a movie set,
Where the setting sun throws dappled beams
Through the trees, not far from the town of Settle.
I set myself foursquare, blocking his exit.
“What kind of mindset have you,” I asked,
Set on killing innocent creatures?”
“Set yourself aside,” he replied.
“Don’t upset yourself over a badger.”
“There are a set of laws forbidding this,” I argued.
“They’re not set in stone,” he countered,
“And besides you wouldn’t set the law on me.”
I had to settle this somehow.
“There’s a chess set in the drawer,” I said.
“Set out the pieces and Winner takes All.”
I knew he was set in his ways. He accepted.
Though the odds were set against me,
If I set my mind to it, I could win.
With the onset of dawn, I finally did.
He set his jaw in a grimace, but shook my hand.
I turned on the television set.
We settled on the settee to watch the highlights
Of the final set in the Wimbledon final
Between Tessa Somerset and Essy Teigh.
Quadrillion
(An article in the Guardian about scientists developing the quantum battery
referred to the femtosecond)
Try to imagine a femtosecond.
Try to conjure in your mind
The tiniest moment in your life.
A blink, a sharp intake of breath,
A passing thought, here now gone,
A fly buzzing past your ear,
A direct glance at the sun.
Each and every moment
Took a quadrillion femtoseconds.
Now consider the mind that conceived
The notion of the femtosecond,
That learned to measure
That pin prick of time;
A brain with eighty six billion neurons
Sparking a quadrillion impulses daily;
A mind that took a million years to develop.
A million years.
How many femtoseconds is that?
