Science Poems for January 2011: 9

Last April I posted a science sonnet a day in celebration of National Poetry Month (index with links here). This January 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" occurs Jan. 13-16, 2011. Click on the logo below to access their daily digest (already active) on paper.li.



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.



Today's poem takes its cue from "Not So Bird-Brained: 3D X-Rays Piece Together the Evolution of Flight from Fossils" (Science Daily, Jan. 3, 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 below the title.

The Ascent of Descendants
(Form: Villanelle)

What led some dinosaurs into the sky?
Computerized tomography may show
How larger brains could lead to birds that fly.

Within our modern species, we could spy
And learn, by viewing skulls from long ago,
What led some dinosaurs into the sky

Without a sense of balance gone awry.
To process vision in a 3D flow
Takes larger brains in modern birds that fly.

We think a bigger flocculus is why,
A gift that evolution would bestow
That led some dinosaurs into the sky.

Perhaps the dodo's loss of flight could tie
That cerebellum bit to what we know
Makes larger brains in modern birds that fly.

The robin sings. Its plumage soothes my eye.
Cretaceous avian prefigures crow.
What led some dinosaurs into the sky,
So larger brains could lead to birds that fly?

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