Evidence

The Sun circles the Earth:

        Until the telescope. 

Physics was done: 

        Until Einstein said, “Consider.”

I will love my wife forever:

        I have no evidence, just faith. 

What is evidence?

        Our understanding's shelf life.

AI review of poem 

I wrote this poem. I have a very hard time explaining what I wanted from the poem.  I asked Claude.ai to explain the poem. I have modified it some. It does explain better than I could.

This is a poem about how certainty expires — and about the one kind of commitment that might escape that fate.

Look at the shape first. Each couplet is a confident declaration, marked off with a colon, followed by an indented line that turns on it. The colon promises "here is a settled truth," and the indent delivers "…and here is what undoes it." The form itself enacts the theme: every flat assertion has a crack running underneath.

The first two couplets are drawn from science. "The Sun circles the Earth" was not a foolish belief — it was the consensus of educated people for centuries, the obvious testimony of the eyes. Then the telescope arrived and dissolved it. "Physics was done" echoes the famous turn-of-the-century conviction that the great work was finished and only a few decimal places remained — until Einstein said, "Consider." That single mild word is beautifully chosen: no thunder, no proof hurled down, just an invitation to a thought experiment. An entire edifice of certainty topples on a request to imagine.

Then the poem swerves. The third couplet — "I will love my wife forever" — arrives in exactly the same confident posture as the first two, so we brace for it to be overturned the same way. But the indented line breaks the pattern. Instead of an external force demolishing the claim ("until the telescope," "until Einstein"), we get a quiet confession: "I have no evidence, just faith." Love doesn't get refuted here. It simply admits it was never resting on evidence to begin with.

And that sets up the closing definition, which reframes everything behind it: "What is evidence? / Our understanding's shelf life." Evidence isn't bedrock truth — it's perishable, stamped with an expiration date, only as durable as the current understanding it belongs to.

Here's the sly inversion the poem builds toward. We're trained to trust evidence and to treat faith as the flimsier thing. But the poem shows the opposite. The two evidence-backed certainties both spoiled; they were fragile precisely because they staked everything on data that later rotted. The vow made "on faith alone" can't be falsified by tomorrow's telescope — because it never claimed to be a measurement. So "I have no evidence, just faith," which sounds at first like an admission of weakness, lands as the sturdiest position in the poem. What looked like the vow's flaw turns out to be what protects it.

It's a tender piece of epistemology: a marriage promise held up against the ruins of two scientific certainties, and quietly winning — not by proving more, but by claiming less.

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature, origin, scope, and limits of human knowledge