Margaret Bradstock: Two Poems

The Moon via telescope

1. Annular eclipse of the sun. 29th April, 2014

A thoroughly bizarre eclipse, mostly visible

to penguins in Antarctica

the blood-red sun sinking between trees

the moon a black disk biting in

part of its shadow

just missing Earth.

2. Occultation of Saturn. 14th May, 2014

It’s at its brightest, all oval-shaped storms

and frozen rings, particles of rock and ice

whirling forever like a fairground Ferris wheel.

From your back veranda

focussed on Saturn, racing away from the moon

the bent moon rising and rising

criss-crossed with black branches

its craters visible from here, we feel it.

The absence of stars, shifting emptiness of space

harks back to the big nothing.

3. In all its phases.

Since Apollo 11 and Armstrong’s moon-walk

(and was it a fake after all?)

the moon boasts no old man, or even giant rabbits

but has its craters, valleys, mountains, seas

its Mare Cognitum and Serenitatis.

I saw icy wind-carved peaks

and down through hidden valleys

tumbled shelves of rock, fringed with hanging icicles

like long white teeth, ravines so deep and black

a wind-eaten bridge of stone, nothing

but space on either side, the mountains

folding back upon themselves.

       Other Worlds

A neanderthal handprint, eons old

                  marks the cave wall

an understanding of time,

              some idea of the seasons, a future

to make the darkness visible

like Bede’s lone sparrow, flying

              securely from the lit-up meadhall

                                    into this unknown silence;

the parallel sighting of a bird of paradise

its ruddy plumes aflame

             destined to vanish into the mass of green.

Inbuilt, this need for some afterword:

De Quiros in another century

              voyaging towards the South Land

                            his vision and obsession;

William Lane’s utopian dream

                  a new-world colony in Paraguay

Nueva Australia, then Cosme, further south.

Mormon settlers crossed the Mojave desert

          in search of salvation and a promised land.

The seed vault of icy Longyearbyen

              was built to preserve a food-store’s DNA

                             for 20,000 years

if galaxies or climates don’t collide.

New worlds swim into our sight

              like hedgerow prominences on the sun,

we need the “glint” or rainbows from their oceans

                     the sign of water in their atmosphere.

Kepler 438b is one of these, 475 light years away

          perhaps our “twin”, a double indemnity?

I dream a transit life, the air (blue, or a shade thereof)

is filled with plastic drones (like particle bubbles)

    collecting information. Thinking to move to where

the grass (if it exists) is greener, to a galactic

              urban sprawl beyond the crowded CBD?

                            Get in before the rush.

Margaret Bradstock