Plunge

Swan dive into cold:
last picture of the giant
as it subsumes you.

Distant Cousins

Your stars are very distant cousins
the family fails to mention

each birth and death
a million oceans away

from family chatter

and not recorded for posterity.

It’ll Do

The camera comes in closer
to the lip of the dish
and calls attention
to the antenna

then dips down to show
the full depth
as the music swells
especially the low strings

we viewers are filled up
down to our toes

as if the dish were an ocean
we were seeing clear to the bottom of

glistening with fish
–the sparkling percussion tells us so–

we stare down but are somehow staring up, too
into more ocean
than we could ever imagine swimming in.

It’ll do.

It will be a clear day

It will be a clear day
when I leave the Earth

trouble capped at 10,000 ft

and birds below
will circle in
and repeat a sound
from a poem
I knew well

just out of hearing.

 

 

Hic sunt dracones

  

Comet 67P

  

“Zero g, and I feel fine.”

  

 

Intrepid

  

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

 

Go, Hot Dog, Go!