Ginsberg: Poem Rocket

Extracts from 'Poem Rocket'

This is my rocket my personal rocket I send up my message

Beyond

Someone to hear me there

My immortality

without steel or cobalt basalt or diamond gold or mercurial fire

without passports filing cabinets bits of paper warheads

without myself finally

pure thought

message all and everywhere the same

I send up my rocket to land on whatever planet awaits it

preferably religious sweet planets no money

fourth dimensional planets where Death shows movies

plants speak (courteously) of ancient physics and poetry itself is manufactured by the trees

the final Planet where the Great Brain of the Universe sits waiting for a poem to land in His Golden pocket

joining the other notes mash-notes love-sighs complaints-musical shrieks of despair and the million unutterable thoughts of frogs

moon+over+imperial+web.jpg

The moon over Imperial College and a brilliantly lit planet.....

Rebecca Elson - 'Girl with a Balloon'

From this, the universe

In its industrial age,

With all the stars lit up

Roaring, banging, spitting,

Their black ash settling

Into every form of life,

 

You might look back with longing

To the weightlessness, the elemental,

Of the early years.

 

As leaning out the window

You might see a child

Going down the road,

A red balloon,

A little bit of pure Big Bang,

Bobbing at the end of her string

 

Note: Most of the helium in the universe was created in the Big Bang.

Rebecca Elson was an astrophysicist and poet.

Rebecca Elson - 'We Astronomers'

We astronomers are nomads,

Merchants, circus people,

All the earth our tent.

We are industrious.

We breed enthusiasms,

Honour our responsibility to awe.

 

But the universe has moved a long way off.

Sometimes, I confess,

Starlight seems too sharp,

 

And like the moon

I bend my face to the ground,

To the small patch where each foot falls,

 

Before it falls,

And I forget to ask questions,

And only count things.

 

by Rebecca Elson,astophysicist and poet