What follows is a poem about the Voyager spacecraft I wrote a long time ago, when the world and I were very different than we are today. For a multisensory experience, you can read along while listening to a splendid set-to-space-noise version here.
Science Poetry
“The spherical alga Volvox swims by means of flagella on thousands of surface somatic cells. This geometry and its large size make it a model organism for studying the fluid dynamics of multicellularity. Remarkably, when two nearby Volvox colonies swim close to a solid surface, they attract one another and can form stable bound states […]
Note: This post is best read on a computer screen, but a phone’ll still work. One day last year, my friend Tonya messaged our group chat with a lovely update: a heron had landed in front of their house to eat a fish. The rest of us were enchanted by the thought of it, but […]
* Text: If You Were Looking for a Sign, This Is It Yesterday was hard. The day before yesterday, hard, too. Somehow, something about today has made it soft. Not the unrelenting blankness of the December sky. Not the pain in my teeth, or my hands, or my aching heart. Not the electric bill. Not […]
The maple tree across the street is shivering. Just this morning, she’d stopped my breath with the red-gold flames of her leaves. Now I watch from the kitchen window as brutal gusts shred her gorgeous coat and dash the scraps to the ground. My eyes stay fixed on the bare tree while my mind cycles […]
Eclipse The earth moved to follow his smile, but she stood aside, let the planet pass. Her signs were subtler: quivers of little stars, the sucking dark depths of the ocean. Young women turned their faces to him like flowers, hoping for a laugh, an accidental touch, and men labored hard to prove their worth […]
Long before I knew that science writing could be a job, I wrote science poems. A lot of them. Sometimes several in a day. And just as quickly, I abandoned them and moved on to the next vivid factoid in astronomy, anatomy, or animal behavior. There are hundreds of these dashed-off verses in my files, […]