Friday, January 21, 2011

Science Poems for January 2011: 21

Last April I posted a science sonnet a day in celebration of National Poetry Month (index with links here). This month I am posting a science poem a day, written in various traditional forms, in honor of Science Online 2011.

The "fifth annual international meeting on Science and the Web" ran from Jan. 13-16. Click on the logo below to access the conference page, which has links to posts, tweets, photos, and videos from the event.



As with the sonnets, my January poems take their cues from science-based articles. I also have two works in a special science poem section (vol. 33 #5/6) of Star*Line, journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. You can read my "Ciliate Sestina" here.

Also, two sonnets from last April's collection, "In Development" and "Manipulations," have made it into Open Laboratory 2010 Click on the badge below for links to the 50 essays, 6 poems, and 1 cartoon in the collection.


(Click here to see Andrea Kuszewski's gorgeous cover!)

Today's poem takes its cue from "Thaw of Earth's icy sunshade may stoke warming" (Alister Doyle, Scientific American, Jan. 16, 2011). Click on the article link to learn more about the research. To learn more about the traditional poetic structure used, click on the form name.

Mirror, Fading
(Form: Ghazal)

Arctic ice dwindles to water that may reflect no more.
Land conquers permafrost, and might some day reflect no more.

Outpaced climate models fall to new sensitivity.
Older calculations paint graphs, but they reflect no more.

Dark earth speeds the melting snow; sunlight warms the underground.
Naked lie the summits that in array reflect no more.

Hunting grounds dissolve -- what becomes of food beneath the waves?
Will clouds mirror sunlight, or shades of gray reflect no more?

Thirty years of data, barely a breath of cold night air.
To what measure? Old extremes kept at bay reflect no more.

Some summer the north pole may lap, waves cresting a deep sea,
A future of forebodings that I pray reflect no more

Elissa Malcohn's Deviations and Other Journeys
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