Resonance

 

"Girl on Swing" (oil on canvas, 1996) by Ruth Addinall

A childhood memory, memorialized in this Shakespearean sonnet, its title reflects several definitions of the word resonance, for example, the ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions, as well as resonance in physics, which refers to a wide class of phenomena that arise as a result of matching temporal or spatial periods of oscillatory objects. 

Perhaps the most familiar example of resonance in everyday life is swinging on a playground swing. The first push or pump sets the swing in motion. Each subsequent push or pump is delivered at just the right time to increase the amplitude of swing. If you continue pushing or pumping over a period of time, the swing will gradually go higher and higher.

Each pump of my swing was a fervent wish for my father's return from out-of-state hospitalization for his paralytic polio.

You can hear me read it HERE.

Resonance

Swinging is self-limiting: you can’t go past the horizontal in front or in back.

— Dr. Stephen A. Lawrence, Insights into Physics

 

The government delivered processed cheese.

The Philadelphia cousins sent old clothes.

I sucked my thumb, inventing destinies.

Still years away, Mom’s Tropicana rose.

I found some comfort on our backyard swing,

pumping and chanting into the arc’s peaked crest

where angular momentum let me fling

toward light-spangled leaves.

                                                It was the best

of amplitudes—this go-for-broke reprieve

from gravity—because I knew she’d fret

me down from all I knew of bliss. Naïve

to think I’d charmed my father home, I let

go, flying from the damping pendulum,

which soon regained its equilibrium.