Poem: Space Dreams
A bleak little piece from that blink-and-you-missed-it heartbeat between 9/11 and Iraq. I was browsing 'space art' from the 1960s and reflecting on how the dream of the Space Age had turned to be illusion. Even Stanley Kubrick missed it; the artists' visions then were all about how we'd cope as humans with massive mega-engineering projects in space, not on how there'd be struggles to keep 30-year-old technology flying.
The phrase 'grieved for falling shards' seems ominous in retrospect, as if this were a pre-requiem for Columbia. There were no manned US disasters in orbit before 2003, so why did the word 'grief' come to mind? I think I was thinking of Skylab and Apollo 13. But this makes a pair with 'Angel Falling', though it wasn't intended that way.
we had such visions then
sketched water-colour shapes
of star utopias
and one small pale blue world
the sky was not enough
to hold our upturned gaze
we counted satellites
and grieved for falling shards
the night was rich and blue
it seemed we had grown wings
and godlike strummed the dawn
to touch all things with grace
it broke, that fevered sweat
in which we were alive
into the quiet dark
we fell with no complaint
and now the moon is high
on concrete and on crime
it shines with cold delight
and calls our future, blood
Poem: Oh Jerusalem
2002, the Second Intifada kicked into flaming overdrive by Bush's cowboy vendetta. Blood on all hands. Somewhere in Jerusalem there is an olive tree planted in the name of my mother. When peace comes even here, surely that will be the end of the age.
Oh Jerusalem
i have no words
i have no tears
i cannot weep
i cannot breath
the offering burned
the olive crushed
the plastique shroud
the gunship dawn
an eye for an
will die by the
let not one stone
shall fight unto
Oh Bethleham
Oh Tel Aviv
Oh Sharon
Oh Hamas
Pray
Pray for
Pray for the
pieces of Jerusalem
Poem: Lifters
When the Lifter phenomenon began to break. Most of the Lifters themselves didn't demonstrate any anomalous effects, the thrust being explained by electrohydrodynamic effects of ion wind, but the legend of the 'true' Biefeld-Brown Effect - the miniscule, barely detectable variant which shows up, impossibly, in hard vacuum, and even then only in transient spikes - persists.
Lifters
for Jean-Louis Naudin
I.
Triangle of tin
foil and balsa, wire and glue
so my spirit soars.
II.
Thirty kilovolts
is the breakdown point of awe
this force has no name.
III.
Discs in autumn cloud
sunspot blurs on Kodachrome
how long did they lie?
IV.
Webcam videos
capture frozen images
scales tipping up -
V.
Tesla, Townsend Brown
legend, alchemy, deceit
-- but it flies, it flies!