Lay Terms

The laity are no longer

Aware of being laity,

Many never were, and the term

Lay terms would be obscure to them.

Say plain language, say regular

Speech, instead, or something like that.

Math is now the priest tongue proper,

Trickier to translate than verse,

Than allegorical visions,

The dactyls of Parmenides

Building the absence they denied,

Opinion, which didn’t survive,

Trickier to explain than God,

Who after all could be remade,

And was, to taste, by each new faith.

Axioms may be forever

Incomplete, but there’s no turning

Pure mathematics back to scratch,

Claiming some new dispensation,

New visions erasing priors.

It doesn’t work like that. No one

Can tell a cosmologist where

To get off who isn’t fluent

In math’s sacred lingua franca.

How would you put that in lay terms,

Precision lost in translation?

Mathematicians need nothing

To show how no one knows nothing.