Sixty six thousand miles an hour she spins us around her
yet a layer of grey moistness
stops the Sun’s nuclear furnace from warming my bones
as I lie here on the garden deck
wrapped old lady like in fleece blanket
and suburban birdsong
Five hundred thousand miles an hour we all turn around
the black maw at galactic central
that swallows worlds and never enough
lunching on stellar archipelagoes
leading me to think of Schwartzchild radii
and equations I once manipulated.
Faster than both, you fall through the front door
laughing over the factorisation error you made
in today’s school test.
Functionally innumerate, mathematically gifted,
golden, green eyed geek son of mine.
Copyright © 2020 Kim Whysall-Hammond
For my youngest son, 19 today, still a geek, soon to be an aerospace engineer.
This poem was written when he was still at school.
I do like it, I can almost see one of my comics gleaning inspiration from this….
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Oooh….that would be fun…. :)
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I really like this one–I’m a bit of a geek myself🤔
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Us Geeks are what makes the world go round!
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This poem to me is a lot of fun. Anyone with a usable brain is at least a little bit geek!
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Very probably! It’s the ownership of Geekhood that people have difficulty with.
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Quite so. Some deny their geekdom, some shyly admit it, and some hungrily embrace and crow about it. Geek and proud.
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…and me!
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Well, now I know that a Schwarzschild radius is a thing, but not what it is or why :)
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The Schwarzschild radius is the distance from the center of a non-rotating black hole to it’s event horizon. You don’t want to go past the event horizon, trust me. So knowing the Schwarzschild radius is important….. :)
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Thanks. Next time I get near an event horizon I’ll know when to stop :)
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Always glad to help……. :)
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A friend of mine was doing his PhD in cosmology when the movie “event horizon” came out and he made the mistake of going to see it… I can still remember him waving his arms and foaming at the mouth about it.
Nice to meet a fellow geek and poet! :D
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Hello Kate, geek and poet is a rare thing, so welcome! I have various Geeky science poems on this blog for you to enjoy. :)
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I’ve started reading them. :) I’ve got a few on mine too – physics rather than astronomy though.
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Physics is fun but astronomy is beautiful…. ;)
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;) Astronomy is a branch of physics – a pretty, sparkly one, but a branch… (Ducking for cover now) :D
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Aaaa, but astronomy is older than physics…. :)
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