The Sky Above, The Mud Below

Galactic Operas by the Billions and Billions
Big Bang Boosters and Cosmological Roosters

Inspired by the evening skies of Tinian, and Anne Lynch Botta (1815 -1891) and her humorous poem “To An Astronomer.”

On 21st century cosmologists
and their many predecessors
we should concentrate
even though their equations are
for the most part incomprehensible
and difficult for us terrestrials
for more LHC discoveries we must wait
for them to find more Higgs bosons
among subatomic celestials
they don’t even need to see any skies
polluted, convoluted, black, or blue
or any old or new comets
or  supernovas and nebulae
that come between us
when with satellite data
they can sit the night through
and gaze at billions
and billions of galaxies
billions of miles past Venus.
Thank you scientists, physicists:
Greene, Carrol, Burnell, Linde,
Feynman, Fang, Higgs, Hawking,
Einstein, Copernicus, Galileo,
Kepler, Brahe, Guth, Krauss,
Abe, Mori, Suzuki, Chandrasekhar,
and of course Sir Isaac Newton,
and thousands of others …
who have been stalking those
moments before, during, and after
the BIG BANG and beyond …
on which our origins and future
hang, and before we pass through
heaven’s gates or evolve into
compost and food for worms
look up the universe awaits
and as our world turns enjoy
the dance in the darkness
listen to the galactic operas.

Mud, a Minor Metamorphosis

Inspired by Amy Steiger’s poem, “I love mud,” posted on Feb. 28, 2019 on Facebook. Amy Steiger, thanks for the inspirations on some muddy situations.

I dig dirt, not so much dust, just plain dirt gets my trust
it doesn’t bother me when I get some good clean dirt
clinging to my work pants, shirt, or hands doing work
I dug dirt planting trees in fire burns in Oregon and B.C.
someone else will have to dig it when they bury me
dug vegetable gardens in our western hillside backyard
through frozen muddy wet clay that even thawed was hard

I don’t mind mud, as a kid I made many designer mud pies
of random shapes and sizes, and never kept one of them hid
even mud on the floor in the kitchen or on my shoes and boots
muddy tracks to and from the door, rain and dirt in cahoots
messy mucky mud gets caked on and all over the place
drying in the sun gets well baked on some kids burned face
from the stars and skies above to the earth’s mud below
our universe, our world , and all of us continue to grow.