Counterweight

Newton’s Law of Universal Gravity: The closer two objects are to each other, the more they want to come together. The more massive the objects, the more they want to come together. It explains why the moon doesn’t float away from the Earth and why our planet insists on orbiting our sun. Gravity pulls down castles, causes rockslides, chips away at mountains. Gravity is serious business.

According to Newton’s law, then, the pull of the earth on a sunflower should be more than 1600 times stronger than the pull of the sun on the same flower. And yet, everyday, with inimitable insouciance, the helianthus follows the sun’s arc across the sky, tracking its movements with a devotion that demonstrates that distance is no object for this kind of love.





Melissa Fu grew up in Northern New Mexico and now lives near Cambridge, UK. Her prose and poetry has appeared in several journals including Bare Fiction, Envoi, Right Hand Pointing, and the Blue Heron Review.

You can see more of her work in issue 4.4