Farewell Philae — For Now

Poem below by Stuart Atkinson (@mars_stu on Twitter).  Painting by Christine Rueter AKA Tychogirl (paper, printing ink).  This collaborative poem/art project has been simultaneously published at Stuart’s blog: https://astropoetry.wordpress.com/2016/08/18/farewell-philae-for-now/. 

Beneath sheets of sparkling frost,
Lost Philae sleeps now, and will doze
Until, one day, who knows when,
Men and women from Earth,
Their boots crusted with clods of soot-black comet
Dust and snow will crump slowly across
67P’s frozen plains and see it –
A glint of gold in a shadow,
High up on a crumbling cliff’s side,
Shining like a wolf’s eye.
And then the Fellowship of Philae
Will hike up Seths serrated cliffs
Until, high above Hapi’s sands
They’ll reach out with shaking hands
And drag it from its icy tomb
Into the light, setting it upright again,
Brushing years of ice and dust
From its face before taking it
To its final resting place – a glass case
At ESOC, spotlights warming it,
Thawing a century of frostbite…

But for now, Philae sleeps,
Without Rosetta’s alarm clock beep-beep-beep
Interrupting its dreams
Of what might have been,
If only those hapless harpoons had fired…
If only it hadn’t bounced like a rubber ball…
If only it hadn’t fallen into that dark place,
Landing, legs splayed,
In a lonely hole hidden from the Sun’s precious rays…

(c) Stuart Atkinson 2016

LIGO

 

Poem below by Stuart Atkinson (@mars_stu on Twitter).  Painting by Christine Rueter AKA Tychogirl (acrylic, gesso, wire, canvas).  This collaborative poem/art project has been simultaneously published at Stuart Atkinson’s blog: astropoetry.wordpress.com. 

 

It didn’t look like much – just a jiggle of lines on the screen,

Like the ECG chart of the heartbeat of a dying man

Dragging every precious breath from the air,

Or the marks scratched by a pen onto a paper scroll

As a tremor rolled along the San Andreas Fault.

But it was History, there for all to see, an image

As glorious as Galileo’s asterix-etched sketch of Jupiter’s

Mischevious moons, or Rosse’s portrait of the great

Whirlpool drawn at the Leviathan’s eye;

A record of a whisper that had travelled for more than a billion years,

So soft, so faint that the slow turn of a page

In a library’s quietest corner would sound as loud

As a hurricane’s howling wind to the instruments’ ears,

And the lifting of a single strand of a sleeping new-born’s hair

By a passing summer breeze would crack like a Balrog’s whip.

Hard to believe, looking at that jagged mountain range trace

That we were staring the deepest of deep physics in the face,

Looking back in time to when a pair of black holes danced,

Swirling dervishes, dense as 60 Suns,

Their shirts and skirts of Hawking radiation twirling as they whirled

Around each other in a giddy reel, then

Hurtled together at half the speed of Light –

 

What a sight that must have been,

But hominid eyes would not look to the sky for an eternity more,

And when it finally cocked an ear in their direction

LIGO could hear only echoes of their ancient laughter,

Waves tumbling in from the depths of space and time,

Lapping at our feet, rippling round, through and past the Earth

Like the melodies of distant whale-song.

 

© Stuart Atkinson 2016

 

I will cry

  

The o-o-old lunar surface

I therefore waited for the next night

Because I could not go to Space –

A loving rewrite of two lines of Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death -“.

So moved they on through aether