Manifold Wonder: a Wikimedia poem

by Francesca Beard

Imagine a breathing in breathing out star-blessed planet
Inhabited by magical creatures, like the Tardigrada
Also known as moss piglets and water bears
Who can survive permafrosts, active volcanoes, outer space.
That’s our world.
Imagine beings capable of destroying paradise with the power of their mind.
That’s our world.
Conjure a world where one user creates something new,
Out of atoms of air, unlike anything else ever before,
And others recognise it instantly, add to it, share.
That’s our world, a super-massively subtle, intricate looping dance
Of energy, cascading, shedding joules like sequins
Through the unfurling pattern of perfectly folded proteins
Picture this symphony of amazement.
See it fragile,
Witness it going.
We need to join forces, pool resources, keep it safe.
How? We live so close and so separate
In a kaleidoscopic Venn diagram multiverse of overlapping circles,
Which in reality, might be light years apart
Though they still throw shade on each other’s planes.
Every mortal on this planet seems to be a potential hero,
And their own worst enemy, shining searchlights into the wrong caves.
Our story’s a long timeline of blokes like Oedipus and Chuang Tzu and Hamlet,
Staring stunned at the stars wondering Who am I, why are we?
Once upon a dream we imagined a digital revolution,
Of friendly global villages, where everyone took in each other’s virtual bins,
Human consciousness uploaded into an expanding sphere of universal social literacy.
In practise, the solemn reverberations of your most sacred echo chamber
Are noodled to noise in the hissing stir fry of my social media feed.
What if there was somewhere everyone could find a meeting of minds,
Reality wasn’t a choice of filters, where cancel culture transitioned into peer review,
Where the names of new proteins FIONA1, SHREK, TOPLESS!’
Were household as Love Islanders and creative commons viral as Kim Kardashian
A database of shared ownership, made not for profit but to profit all.
What if, like penguins in the frozen waste, we could weather this climate crisis
By time-sharing centre stage, shuffling the pack, the high low ace
No one edged out, marginalised, so we all survive,
With access for all to the inner circle, each of us with a seat at the table,
Everybody able to bask in the warmth of knowing
We all know we are in the same storm and the same boat,
That when we share knowledge, it flows, carries us to where we need to go.
Let’s dream of a world, where right now, a kid in Alaska and two in Nairobi
and one in Sydney by way of Karachi are uploading scientific data
From Wikimedia to their brains, freely streaming information
Translated by early career researchers, that will lead them to cross reference
Follow sources, edit, contribute, collaborate and meet face to face in a lab in Leeds
Where they will find a cure for the cancer that killed your great grandmother,
That will save your granddaughter.
Believe that, for a fact.
Here’s a fact, facts leave us cold, stone faced
It’s stories that change landscapes
From the Stone Henge circles to the Easter Island statues
We move mountains when we believe.
But we need new stories, because the ones we have now, the ones about how
A brighter future is our destiny, how we stand on the shoulders of giants
To see not just further but better, that’s post truth, that’s fake news
There is no happy ever after, no mystical fairy tale millennium where we all wear silver.
If we want progress and change, we need to change how we progress.
The old stories about a singular saviour rising heroic out of a crowd
Have brought too few of us too far, too fast.
We need a new story about how we move as one, slower, surer, further.
It’s not about a thousand millionaires rocketing to Mars
It’s about five billion citizens supporting science to nurture drought resistant plants.
We have the technology, we have the wherewithal, we need the collective will,
And that’s down to you and me, ordinary extraordinary human beings,
That early career researcher in a Leeds lab uploading her images to Wikimedia,
The secondary school teacher, wiki user, who knows how to explain DNA to RNA
So that any 12-year-old can start to figure out Who am I? why are we?
It’s about base line knowledge, everyone on common ground,
Across cultures, currencies, and mother tongues.
What if this is a world where we are all the hero and the storyteller?
Where we all help each other to make our stories truthful and free
Imagine if we all come together to share those stories on Wikimedia?
What a wonderful world this would be.