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
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Previously published on In Between Hangovers
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
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
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
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
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
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
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
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
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.
Royal Edinburgh Observatory
Poor lost instrument, trapped in your tower
Where the dome never opens from year to year.
They no longer use you to search the heavens
Battered and bruised, missing parts, you lurk in the darkness of your cage
If only I could find glass plates, unwrap them in the dark, open the dome and set you free
Copyright © 2015 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Re-blogged from 2015.
Sweet Blood
By the numbers
Do I track my bodily betrayal
Silent sugars gnaw at me
Shorten my life, threaten my sight
My feet and so mobility
By the numbers
Media propaganda
Labels me guilty
A self inflicted pariah
Costing the state drugs, injections
By the numbers
I labour on
Researching the evidence
Counting the carbs
Pulling the weights
Five walks a week
Of thirty minutes each
Defying the numbers
My chosen path
And the numbers drop
My body may falter
But I shall not
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
One of my poems has just been published at “In Between Hangovers”………
Nebulaic drift of space glows pregnant with stars
Pulsates with unseen radiation, reflects light upon broken hulls
Billowing gases thread through holes laced by stellar blasts
Huge gas pillars glow with the light from star birth
Strange shapes eclipse the details of nebulaic magnificence
Ships riddled by particle winds after a disaster deep in spacetime
Now drift in loose orbits within a mystery, artefacts lost to sentience and story
Deep in the cloud lies a graveyard drifting to gravity’s pale tune
Gas jets burst from infant stars, glow in unseen colours
Shoot forth ionized subatomic debris
Push against torn metal, shifting orbits, prompting collisions
Against desiccated limbs, simulating life once more
The beings who struggled and died here disassociate and powder to dust
Microbes drift and seed, await rebirth in planetary clouds
Amino acids alter with the alien input
Nucleotides drift forward to the future
Ghost DNA haunts the spaces…
View original post 50 more words
Heart and soul
Something seems to have punched holes in the sky
Ringed with burning hydrogen, glowing against the dark
So we can peer through to blues, brighter stars
A sparkling alternate perhaps
Where life is sweet, death is no robber
All is bathed in glorious light
But look again, these apparent peep-holes
Are no miniatures, they are huge
Light takes hundreds of years to cross them
And millennia to arrive here with this picture
Celestial chrysanthemums colouring the sky
Tempting me to fantasy
Copyright © 2016 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Here is a poem by Louis Faber that I would like to share with you. You can find it (and many other good poems, including some great science ones) at https://anoldwriter.com/
Boundary
What is on the other side
of this wall that is just
too tall to peer over?
No one seems to know,
though many have surmised
it is a completely different world
looking little or nothing
like the one we inhabit.
Last week a young man
picked up a ginkgo leaf
and said “ahah, it is Japan
across that wall,” but we
mostly thought he was crazy.
Once, when the world was flat,
people knew if you sailed
too far you would fall off.
But the brave ones then
always wondered what sort
of world existed on the other side,
was it desert or tropical jungle
and when it was night here
was it day there or did the sun
simply sleep for ten hours?
This morning a young man
leaned a tall latter
against the wall and slowly
and carefully slipped over the top.
We shouted after him, asking
what it was like: did rainbows
look the same, was grass green,
but all we heard was his
retreating footfalls, and
his plaintive voice shouting:
“Eve, are you here?
I have the apple.”
Louis Faber
