Hubble — Poem in Pleiades Form

To celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s deployment into space, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., pointed Hubble’s eye at an especially photogenic pair of interacting galaxies called Arp 273. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. This image is a composite of Hubble Wide Field Camera 3 data taken on December 17, 2010, with three separate filters that allow a broad range of wavelengths covering the ultraviolet, blue, and red portions of the spectrum.

Hubble

Hazy tidal bridge with
hot and bright newborn stars
has lopsided structure
highly warped from the plane.
How this spiral pattern
hauls swaths of blue-jewel stars
hitched to galactic disks.

**************************

Hear this on Sound Cloud

**************************

Written for:

MeetingTheBar: Pleiades

Today, Vandana Sharma prompts us to write a Pleiades Form Poem. This consists of seven lines, each line starting with the same letter as the title. The title is a single word. Preferably it should be about space, which is NO PROBLEM for me.

Image credits: NASA Rose of Galaxies

foam

Carina Nebula – from Hubble

canned cream
at your mouth
in your face

fall flat air bubble fairies
toothlessly smiling
with balding hair
of baby similitude
like bellwort slobber
sputtering radioactive blood

cold,  solid steam
carbonated, chlorinated
fumigated, undulated
meta foam
like carpal fountains
of spread fingers

certified, personified,
versified foam
cools rage
quenches nightmares

smokeless frosting
delivered by messenger service
soothing, illimitable
universal soup of life

**************************

Hear this on chirbit

**************************

Written for:

Meeting the Bar: Impressionistic writing

Image Credit:NASA, ESA, M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team (STScI)

The Sestina of KT

If they could only see her face
and the pride in executing these techniques.
Was she a work horse freed from her stable?
No! She is as free as the optical bird
flying above the Earth. “Oh Hubble!
I’ve come to fix your trouble!”

Nation: take time and trouble
to see freedom upon the face
of the attendant of Hubble;
with extraordinary skillful technique
holding a caged wing of the broken bird
drifting downtide toward a distinguished stable.

It takes an astronaut with style so stable
to considers it no trouble
to liberate a fellow solar bird:
reflections of white diamonds in the face-
mask of a sorceress, practicing her technique,
on the broken parts of Hubble.

Caged in her two hands is Hubble,
reconnoitered in its high tech stable
responding to input of dexterous technique:
There is nothing trivial about this trouble.
Road lights are maps of highways on the face-
plate. “How high am I?” asks this American bird.

The wings flap and waver as the paneled bird
escapes her hands. She looks down on Hubble.
The muscles relax: a smile on the face
of a woman who is able, to stand in the stable
of the horses of Apollo. It is no trouble
going forth with privileged technique.

She found her own working techniques
as her tired, heated wings, like a bird
of prey, were cooled by the flowing troubled
draught. She prays for answers from Hubble,
in a universe which may be expanding or stable;
to report the narrations on time’s face.

A rollout of new technique re expresses Hubble
as this thunderbird escapes by a flaming stable.
No more trouble upon this angel’s face.

************************

Written for:

Matt Quinn challenged us to a Sestina. I wrote this in 1993, when astronaut Kathryn Thronton fixed the Hubble Telescope along with her fellow astronauts.

The other astronauts called her KT. She teaches at University of Virginia now.

Here NASA bio:

http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/thornt-k.html

Her bio currently at UVA/Engineering Department

http://www.virginia.edu/facultyexperts/expert.php?id=437