remembrance of blue

A. Ethelwyn Wetherald’s 1902 poem “Tangled in Stars” redacted into a new poem.

the big picture

Cut text from the Apollo 8 Onboard Voice Transcription borrowed for a poem about the Earthrise photo.

Launch

Staring from the blacktop
at my daughter’s school

at the wrong
section of sky

until over the other
line of trees

an orange light
I didn’t expect

grabs me
and then I can’t

look anywhere else

startled by each flare
of separation

as pieces drop away
and come home

and what remains
drops the last of its hue

and keeps going.

Undone Europa

Background image is Jupiter’s moon, Europa. Image credit: Credit: NASA/JPL/Ted Stryk. The borrowed text overwriting the image is from “The Rape of Europa by Jupiter: a masque” (1694).  The current climate of underfunding planetary science makes a mission to Europa unlikely.

space is

A cut text #fundPlanetary haiku. I pulled the text from “Applications of Space Flight in Materials Science and Technology” (materials from a 1977 conference).

Floating a little

A page of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 3 (1836) redacted into a poem.

Elegy

Cut text poem glued to background image (Cassini picture of Saturn scratched with a cheese crater). Cassini and other missions are facing severe budget cuts.  Original image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute