We sleep under twenty four Ohio Stars, a quiet astronomy of triangles and squares. It takes more than seven hundred seams to hold them together, yet their weight is negligible. Twenty years on, where hems have softened, stitches still bind cleanly, show only the slightest fray. There’s a snapshot of the young […]
PNAutumn2012
Star Man
He saw a blue light entering his heart coming from a man he couldn’t see but knew was standing in the stars above the playing field behind his house. The light came like a curl of candle smoke and lit a cooking-apple tree inside his head where he’d built a den and brought flowers in […]
A Questionnaire for the Asteroid Belt
Are you (please tick): o A streak of embryonic stars? o A once-was planet’s last hoorahs? o A cartwheel, stuck within a rut? o Rough diamonds, not quite made the cut? o An inter-planet gastric band? o A jumbled, shifting no-man’s land? o The Heavens’ heaving hula-hoop? o An astronomic loop-the-loop? o […]
Eclipse
The Earth, a fizzing ball bringing this news: look out tonight… Cool, the kids say, brilliant. A dog barks, a few geese pass, noticing nothing. Our own shadow on the face of the moon. Up we come, bundling into the dark attic. Found poem, loosely based on a passage from Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines.
Widow Wickramasinghe’s Small Secret
She’d outlasted a husband, seen four grown sons spread across the world – doing well mind – and one daughter married, contented, a grandmother too. So Mrs Wickramasinghe decided it was time to turn her shoulder to heaven; at the age of seventy-six she began to edge her way toward eternity. Three silver […]
Winter Stars
Those were the nights of frost that fell from the black clear sky to spear the hogback ridge. Shelterless stars huddled together shaking in the bitter air, as the loom of the cold wove needles of ice skim, criss-cross, over the puddles in the tractor ruts. You stood in the lane crook-necked under the […]
The Hadron Collider Star Recipe
(S) = [(Sx), (Sy, (Sz)] Preheat your collider to max turbo – approx. 125 gigaelectronvolts if not a Hadron Collider check manufacturer’s instructions. Ingredients: 1 boson – preferably Higgs Standard Model 1 tin condensed matter – use dark matter for a richer mix 1 row of proton beams – home-grown 1 pack electrons (readymade […]