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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.
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.
ReplyDeleteI’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.
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