Thursday, December 31, 2009

To a Blackbird (for Auld Lang Syne )

Familiar, commonplace,

unnoticed

beneath the trees

a blackbird works the leaves.

-

Searching, delving,

stops,

and through gold rings

looks up at me,

then stirs the fallen leaves of fate

with golden beak.

-

Familiars,

since the wood's birth,

our passing easy,

you working the leaves,

me tending the trees.



http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1396

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Sunday, December 13, 2009

Herschel Uranus Keats

On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer by Keats

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific--and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise--
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

-

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;"


The telescopic image first seen by Hershel would have been a watery one swimming across his field of view. He first thought it was a comet. The 'Eureka!' moment, if that's what it was, came weeks later when he discovered that it was a planet.

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What is fascinating is that later in his life Hershel talks about his discovery of Uranus in same terms as Keats, surely the finest example of poetry expressing a scientific discovery.

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I am indebted to tonight's BBC radio programme, 'Adventures in Poetry' by Peggy Renolds for relating the story.

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Picture: Voyager 2 1986

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Sunday, December 06, 2009

Sad Girl and Her Acorn


The sad girl thought about the acorn
she’d buried in the wet black peat;
her small treasure rotting in the unrelenting rain?

She thought about the lonely boy’s Lego
and into her dark, wet bog a pile of red and white blocks clattered.

Taking a single red block
soon huge,
white, asymmetric wings
pixilated out with tiny white bricks,
a fractal formula
(of six dimensions)
that grew soft warmth
till she lifted away
and the oak shed a pool of red leaves.


After watching the film, ‘Lilya4ever’ in Swedish by Lukas Moodysson, a relentlessly miserable story of Lilya, an Eastern European victim of sex trafficking.

The acorn is Swedish,
the Lego Danish and the image from:
http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs15/f/2007/078/2/1/___White_Agel_Wings_1024x748___by_PinkMonkeyLove.jpg