Category Archives: Science

Ridgeway

September 16, 2017archeology, Ghosts, history, Life, poem, Poetry, Sciencearcheology, Avebury, poem, poetry, prehistory, Ridgeway, Stone age, stone circles, WaylandThe Cheesesellers Wife

Tombs, forts and settlements
String the Ridgeway
As beads on a necklace
Testifying to ancient use
Above the spring line and refreshment
On a hot Summers day
The white chalk is hard walking
Reflecting sunlight back onto the traveller
When wet, millennia of churning feet and wheels
Have crafted a deep sucking cloying mudclay
Is it true that you continue on and under the sea?
A road so old that it predates the English Channel
Is humbling

Walking from the great stones of Avebury
Up through fields to the ridgeline
Following in the steps of so many
Stumbling in snow through ramparts
Thrown up three thousand years ago
Passing where the Smith of the Norse gods
Will shoe tethered horses
Looking down on the rolling plain
Or trudging deep within the occasional copse
Fires my imagination
Brings to mind stories, legends
Archaeological finds and study

Topiary

August 31, 2017archeology, garden, poem, Poetry, Science, science poetryarcheology, Guest poem, humanity, Neolithic, poem, poetry, prehistoryThe Cheesesellers Wife

A map in a foreign language is a misheard story.
The path broken by translation. The betrayal of truth
That slips in, knife-quick, between the fireside and the forgetting,
Stripping the stones of all but cautions to take care
As you step between the constructed cracks, the topiary-shaded grass,
Of gardens grown from the bones of unremembered past.

The paper creases with the the grim grip of disappointment,
Lines bend and meld together, new tracklines between
The dead-living things. And so, new stories begin.

Time has slid away from you here,
Paths well trodden and unseen through the depth of years,
Local tales sing little of your legacy,
The trail an ephemeral, skin-thin thing;
Your mounds made a mockery, mirrored in suburban topiary.

Penelope Foreman

From her blog ‘Suspicious Mounds’

Source: Archaeopoetry #3 – Topiary

Seal

July 27, 2017archeology, art, nature, poem, Poetry, Sciencearcheology, art, history, humanity, Life, Nunalleq, poem, poetry, prehistory, sealThe Cheesesellers Wife

Liquid eyes looking through time, staring out from the wood
Lost possession, unregarded litter, draft for a larger work?
It is treasure now
Seal eloquently sealed into timber
Sparse lines, rich artistry

I’ve just discovered an interibfng wordpress arceological site amd was moved to write the above poem after looking long at a seal carving they have found.

https://nunalleq.wordpress.com/

https://nunalleq.wordpress.com/2017/07/26/artefact-of-the-day-july-25th/

Nunalleq is the name of an archaeological site in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta region of Southwestern Alaska. The University of Aberdeen Department of Archaeology, in partnership with the village corporation Qanirtuuq, Inc. and the Yup’ik Eskimo village of Quinhagak, Alaska, is working to record archaeological sites threatened by rising sea levels along the Bering Sea.

Nunalleq means ‘the OldVillage’ in Yup’ik. Previous years excavations (2009 & 2010) reveal that this ‘old village’ dates back at least 700 years. It is a multi-period prehistoric (or precontact) Yup’ik winter village site.

Terminator Line

June 24, 2017astronomy, Life, nature, poem, Poetry, Science, science poetrydawn, dusk, nature, science, science poetry, sun, Sunset, terminator line, twilightThe Cheesesellers Wife

It is always dawn and dusk
Time moves on geographically
The terminator line marches inexorably
Round and round the planet
Smoothed across the sparkling Pacific
Cut to shreds by jagged mountains
Rippled across desert dunes
Unnoticed in the mega-cities
Each second brings a thousand tiny awakenings
A thousand tiny refugees from sleep
A thousand predatory opportunities
A thousand closings

Previously published on In Between Hangovers

Corona

June 17, 2017poem, Poetry, Science, science poetryCorona, Eclipse, Life, light, science, science poetry, Solar Eclipse, sun, TotalityThe Cheesesellers Wife

Deep in the time of eclipse
As birds bed down and dusk creeps up
We see the Suns halo and crown
Reaching out to her children
Light in the darkness

Sunlight scatters from escaping electrons
Bounces off minute dust particles
While stripped atoms glow as crown jewels
Incandescently hot
Ethereal furnace

The act of seeing makes real
The fact of knowing sees beauty
The inner joyousness of the Universe
Lifts me
Up to the light

Desert sky

May 27, 2017astronomy, beauty, cosmology, Life, nature, poem, Poetry, Science, science poetryastronomy, Blogging, cosmology, Desert, Life, Milky Way, night, poem, poetry, science, science poetry, sky, space, Wadi RumThe Cheesesellers Wife

Driving in a roast red desert
Headlights staring into primeval dark
The untrammeled sky glorious

Above us a bridge of stars
Rivering between rocky horizons
At once near and so very far

Cricking my neck to see
I bounced around the back of the open jeep
Absorbing, amid the shudders, splendor

Star birth and death, worlds hidden by distance
Great glowing nebulae
Fat in the centre, a devouring black hole

Glory

May 14, 2017astronomy, cosmology, Life, nature, philosophy, poem, Poetry, Science, science poetryastronomy, cosmology, Life, NASA, nature, philosophy, poem, poetry, space, UniverseThe Cheesesellers Wife

And we stand upon this globe
Asking of the Universe
What?
Recognition?
Salvation?
Whatever you please
In it’s glory
(Shown by our ingenuity and craft
As we build orbital telescopes)
The Universe does not need us
Unless as an observer
Are we here simply to watch?
Look up, look up
Glory awaits

Dunes

May 7, 2017Life, nature, poem, Poetry, Sciencebeach, dunes, ecosystem, Life, nature, poem, poetry, science, science poetry, sun, travelThe Cheesesellers Wife

Dunes

Rolling along the shore
Linear formation
Field of Dunes
Rounded and steep sloped
Not barren sand
But sheltering life
A sandy ecosystem
That
In turn
Holds down the drifting sand
Rolling along the shore

The little folk

May 3, 2017archeology, Ghosts, Life, poem, Poetry, Science, science poetryfairy, Homo naledi, Life, paleo, paleoanthropology, paleolithic, poem, poetry, prehistory, science, science poetryThe Cheesesellers Wife

Folk tales of little people abound
Retreating to the deep Earth
Now and then to emerge and engage
Ensnare or enslave
With trickery or with passion

Peripatetic you may have been
Leaving small trace of your lives
But deep in an African cave
We have found you
Naledi, little stars

We term the women who reclaimed you to the light
Underground astronauts
Yet you carried your beloved dead here
Through narrow clefts, over parlous depths
To lay them tenderly down to rest

As we stare into our deep past
And find you, Homo naledi
Those of us who wonder
Those of us who marvel
Are ensnared and enamoured

The discovery of fossils of a new human species (Homo Naledi) is, in itself, a fascinating story. But why they are so ‘cool’ is very well explained by our fellow blogger on Fossil History at https://fossilhistory.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/homo-naledi-why-these-fossils-are-so-friggen-cool/

National Geographic describes them as “A fully modern hand sported wackily curved fingers, fit for a creature climbing trees. The shoulders were apish too, and the widely flaring blades of the pelvis were as primitive as Lucy’s—but the bottom of the same pelvis looked like a modern human’s. The leg bones started out shaped like an australopithecine’s but gathered modernity as they descended toward the ground. The feet were virtually indistinguishable from our own.”

The “underground astronauts” (left to right): Becca Peixotto, Alia Gurtov, Elen Feuerriegel, Marina Elliott, K. Lindsay (Eaves) Hunter and Hannah Morris.

Chalklands

April 29, 2017archeology, history, Life, nature, poem, Poetry, Scienceburial, Chalk, Downs, England, flint, geology, hill fort, history, Life, Long Barrow, neanderthal, Neolithic, poem, poetry, prehistory, Stone age, stone circlesThe Cheesesellers Wife

Chalklands

Chalk undulates across Southern England
Hills, gentle yet steep
Can be overtopped by clay peppered with flints
So treasured by the old folk

As old as the hills is true here
The chalk is a two hundred million year ocean
Stiffened and folded over time
By our living planet

Several human species
Have hunted in these valleys
Have dug into and sculpted these hills
Have left their ghosts for us to trace

The ancient monuments we treasure
Hill forts, stone circles, long barrows
Are but modern remnants
Compared to the first folk

My hills have deep roots