Here’s a quick new stream of thought poem from Marc Latham that juxtaposes the big question about humanity’s origins and future centred on Johnny Lydon’s punk band, PiL: Public Image Limited, which came to mind while thinking of how our planet has:
ever more limited resources
each of our lives on it is limited
the amount of knowledge we can gather is limited.
The God PiL
ying and yang
creation and big bang
what’s good for you,
may be bad
for someone else
PiL: Time Knowledge Resources
do something four
times a month
that helps fellow life,
no one knows answer
god or chancer
The European Space Agency (ESA) this week released an image they’d built up out of scans of the universe by the Planck telescope, which is situated a million miles from Earth on its ‘night side’.
The Planck Telescope Universe Image
Our Milky Way galaxy appears as a line in the middle of the image, and so that inspired the Folding Mirror poem below.
It mirrors with a words per line structure of:
4-3-6-5-6-9-9-12 (13) 12-9-9-6-5-6-3-4
The Universe in a Planck
orchid north pole of
cosmic microwave background
radiation. The oldest light of the
Universe; remnants of big bang:
a quite spectacular space travel sharabang.
Cool blue ocean web of new forming stars, contains
dust and gas creating pillars of nebulas, stretch thousands
of light years high through infinity time: birth without fears or tears.
Earth and Sun nestle within Milky Way main disc shining along the fold
we gaze unto deep sky space without seeing spirals within sky gold
protostars grown T Tauri, red giants flickering goodbye die
in cold streams of light, worlds born beyond sight.
Travelling thirteen billion years south time
just ride streams descending down
the beginnings of the life chime
resembling marigold pastures
on creation’s south pole
Over the last few days this site has featured images and poems of the Sombrero galaxy and Ant nebula as the first two instalments of the Hubble Trilogy. Today we bring the space trilogy to a close with a complete image and poem of the universe.
Poem Explanation
Today we have the third and last poem of the trilogy, which tries to capture as complete an image of the whole universe’s space and time as possible within a few words.
I had the idea of structuring the poem like the image of the universe I had read about. Some images suggest it is a big spiralling mirror image, so I created the poem with the words expanding out from the point of singularity (theorised to be what was present before the Big Bang) in the centre.
I structured this by making the lines longer as they spread out from the centre. That original poem is now freely available in all its glory on the Folding Mirror website.
For this site I compacted the poem into a mini version and formatted it onto an image of the M100 spiral galaxy, which represents the whole expanding universe, from the How Stuff Works website.
The poem starts in the centre at the point of singularity and then works vertically outwards to the top and bottom of the image.
mistYmuse 