Gloaming

Last pictures:
our hero enters
the gloaming.

#NaPoWriMo, Day 23. (Cassini raw image, Sept. 14, 2017.)

Plunge

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

Shadows seem to have their place

Shadows seem to have their place
beneath my trees and out in space

I would go there just to see
a shadow same as beneath my tree

stretched thin across another world
gray and black horizontal hold.

Titan and Saturn

Titan and Saturn
shadow worlds surrounded by
an endless black night.

spacecraft and rovers

Spacecraft and rovers from Earth to upper right: Hubble Space Telescope (image credit: NASA), lunar rover Yutu (image credit: China space), Mars rover Curiosity (image credit: NASA/JPL), Cassini (image credit: NASA/JPL), Rosetta (image credit: ESA, image by AOES Medialab), New Horizons (image credit: NASA), Voyager (image credit: NASA), and Pioneer (image credit: NASA).

Instead of being there

Poem typed onto an April 2014 picture of vortex at Saturn’s north pole taken by Cassini. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute.

After the Awful Silence

Background is a raw image (i.e., uncalibrated and unvalidated) by Cassini; the intended image target was Atlas. Image credit: Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Text used to build poem was borrowed from John Goad’s 1699 “Astro-Meteorologica.”

she wanders out

Cut text from various old out-of-copyright texts pasted onto background image from an 1666 text by Roberte Hooke and Giovanni Cassini.

thank you Cassini

Haiku I wrote for my 5,000th tweet honoring the Cassini mission to Saturn. The haiku uses text from Christaan Huygens’ “Celestial Worlds” (1698). The wavy background made from picture of kimono fabric.

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