Saturday, October 1, 2022

Dart

CLICK HERE TO HEAR AUTHOR READ


A game's geometric loveliness

becomes something greater

echoingly earth-shatteringly so,

orbitally small as the electron

and expansive as a planet's clockwork

movement round its thermo-nuclear star,

as new as science and as old and banal 

as bows and arrows, as paradoxical 

as Zeno's condensed notion of time

and as mythical and omnipresent 

as Orion's constellation or 


a tiny projectile pointed 

at a multi-petalled board

numbered one to twenty 

blossom-mounted on a wall

target for a neighbourhood pub pastime

of beer-swilling blokes 

backwards counting from 501

becoming metaphoric 

for out-of-this-world pursuits;


NASA aerospace engineers 

counting backwards 

from 10 to lift-off

and forwards to a future of planetary defense,

a remedy the dumb as dirt dinosaurs 

couldn't muster sixty-six million years ago, 

but we homosapiens, cleverest of the apes,

imagined and made true 

at a cost of billions: 

the Double Asteroid Redirection Test 

nudging Dimorphos the orbiting moonlet 

of asteroid Didymos seven million miles away

like a needle striking a spinning pinhead

from two meters thirty-seven 

blindfolded

bullseye


on screen

a telemetric soundless satellite crash 

heartwarming cheers and back slaps 

for a job well done,

knees up knees up ee-aye-ee-aye-oh


hope

for the inhabitants of one insignificant

floating mote in the Milky Way

one cliché disaster film sequel 

averted.

2 comments:

Ken Stollon said...

This poem, I think, is one of your most ambitious. I didn't like it actually the first time I read it, and I wasn't sure how I was going to break that to you! There's a kind of fantasy for poets, I think, to try to put everything they know into a single poem, and initially I thought that this is what you were trying to do, and perhaps overextending. But on the second and third readings, I see that it's not that at all. It's not overextension, it's hitting the subject right on the mark, bullseye! (forgive, please). Your coupling of the recent asteroid project with throwing darts in a bar is brilliant, and everything else that's insinuated in the physics and geometry of hitting a bullseye is overpoweringly meaningful and mind-blowing.

Glen said...

I’m glad it eventually hit the mark! I think ‘overextension’ is the perfect descriptor. I mean isn’t that what the whole project is about? Stretching out across space. I was struck (pun intended) by how awe inspiring and ambitious the enterprise is, and yet at the same time how small and ordinary, when the team of scientists cheered with collegiality when it succeeded, the joy of being human you might say. It felt like, yeah, ultimately isn’t it all ultimately about contact, about making connections, on the smallest level and on the vastest level, whether we’re talking about math and geometry, physics, mythology, it’s all echoes of the same phenomena of meaning. Concentric ripples made from a splash in space.