Welcome to Poetry Friday. I’m the host this first Friday in July. I hope all of you are well and enjoying summer, in spite of all that’s going on. We must make sure to VOTE this November.
For some reason, my computer won’t allow me to comment on some posts. I will continue to try, but if you don’t see a comment from me, it doesn’t mean I’m not reading and learning from Poetry Friday posts.
I recently bought the book: BILL BRYSON: *A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING, published in 2003.
Reading science never fails to inspire a poem, and this book did. I read in the first few pages about supernovae and learned in laywoman’s terms what they are. Here’s a definition from Bryson’s book:
“Subernovae occur when a giant star, one much bigger than our own Sun, collapses and then spectacularly explodes, releasing in an instant the energy of a hundred billion suns, burning for a time brighter than all the stars in its galaxy.” Star gazer and minister Robert Evans from Australia, who carefully searched for and discovered newly exploding supernovae from his back yard, stated that a supernova is “like a trillion hydrogen bombs going off at once.”
Of course, supernovoe are tremendously far away, so we see only specks of light.
How did he know he had found a newly exploded star? It seems so simple:
Unlike the light from older stars, light from a newly exploded star or supernova “occupies a point of space that wasn’t filled before.”
That’s it. New light in a space that wasn’t filled before. That’s the evidence he looked for. And he apparently was good at finding supernovae with his backyard telescope.
This YouTube video tells about Reverend Robert Evans, amateur astronomer:
So this week, as I sat on my porch behind the wall of leaves that surrounds it, this poem came to me.
WHAT IS OUT THERE? For Robert Evans, amateur astronomer. From my leafy porch, dogs bark, children yell, birds chirp, all invisible. Still, I know they exist and I invent a conversation between unseen sparrows, guess the game being played, from the thud of a ball, picture the size of a dog from a bark, like Mr. Evans, in his yard, in Australia, imagining a supernova, from remnants of sudden distant light, that filled a vacuum between familiar stars. © Janice Scully (draft)
I’ll be away on Poetry Friday, but will catch up and hopefully comment on all the posts later in the weekend. Thank you all for stopping by. I appreciate every visitor.
Janice