She came to see me
Resplendent in red
Glittering with dust
Her elegant bone structure evident more than ever
Desiccated and dead
Spacesuit blown
Floating past the view screen
When I know we retrieved her from orbit yesterday
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Originally published in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Associations print journal Star*Line 40.4 October 2017 http://www.sfpoetry.com/sl/issues/starline40.4.html
Long and large
Lurking on the rails
Panting at the signal
Waiting to be released
Red and polished
Steam about your underskirts
Powerful relic
Your magic persists
Copyright © 2016 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Re-blogged from 2016
We are a brief bloom
On the fragile skin
Of a molten body
Encircling a massive furnace
We are a blossoming of sentience
With encrusted technologies
Craving wonder, hoping for company
Seeking knowledge and excitement
We truly are stardust
Our bodies built from atoms
Forged in successive stellar explosions
We crave the glories of the Universe
We are Human
Copyright © 2016 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Re-blogged from last year
English summers, often damp, can invoke long stifling twilights
Nothing landbound needlessly moves
Contrails crayon across the sky
So many, this close to London’s hub
Distantly, the buzz of a low plane, pleasure rider reaching up
Into the realm of the starlings as they susurrate
A car comes past in the lane droning away round the curves
Here the runway cross remains
The old tower still stands intact
As ponies munch and cattle chew
Larks lurk in the grass where bombers once turned
Occasional ironwork testament to hydrants and gun emplacements
War and weapons layered over by Nature and time
But, as the dark deepens, the lost come home
Tearing blazing incandescent screams rustle up drowsy birds
Look up and the dazzling burning blurs past
Metal screeches as it tears apart, each time the same
One last attempt at landing whole, at bringing the crate home
So wanting to see sweethearts and Blighty again
Then gone, back to oblivion
The burning pilot saluted you as he passed
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
This poem first appeared in Peacock Journal earlier this year.
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 between worlds
Drifts onto comet sand meteors
Drops into planetary atmospheres
Visits us tonight as it has done before
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
First published at In Between Hangovers
Some Science Fiction to celebrate that fact that I’m attending the Science Fiction Worldcon this weekend! 🙂
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air….
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace.
Where never lark, or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
– Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Pt Off. John Gillespie Magee, Jr, RCAF, 1941
John Magee was a Canadian Spitfire pilot in England in World War 2. He died in 1941. This poem is just wonderful and has been quoted again and again —I remember Ronald Reagan quoting it after the Challenger crash.
I wish I could write like this.
I wished upon a star
But instead it was a satellite
I crossed my fingers
But that’s difficult when you trying to type
I can’t remember is it
Good or
Bad luck
To stroke a black cat?
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Like coral
Like coral grips the rock,
I hold fast to you
Like the ocean embraces the Earth,
I embrace you
Like meat loves salt,
I love you
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
M1 in winter (Watford Gap 1 mile)
Mist enwrapped trees extinguish the low orange glow of the Sun
Taillights warm the twilight ahead
Headlights shine on traffic cones and road workers jackets
Jagged shadows in a field reveal a ruined brick barn
Aerofoils loom above, rotating for electricity
We return from lunch with a son at University
Time, long and relaxed, spent talking junk
Films, comics, games, YouTube
Reconnecting the family
Each capsule of metal alongside, before and behind
Contains a story
Adulterous trysts? Mismanaged meeting? Half Term visit to the Zoo?
All these journeys and ours are twenty first century bubbles
Made manifest in the manic twentieth
Our posterity is as yet uncertain
The fields and their shadows will outlive us all
Animals will graze, trees loom in the dark
And Suns set, wetly
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
Another Monday, another watercolour. Here’s an Apollo Astronaut:
Copyright © 2017 Kim Whysall-Hammond
