The Weather Man

Italian scientists convicted over earthquake warning

The Telegraph, 22 October 2012

Not a day passes without a storm warning

though often there's not a cloud in the sky.

Those clear blue days are the longest.

Michael identifies clouds as they file

past the unbarred window of his prison cell.

Bars would only signify, beg to be read

like entrails. No jailer could be that cruel.

Once he was a star on TV, an oracle,

his fall as meteoric as it was total.

Now he fails to foresee hurricanes,

wild fires, monsoons, rising sea levels.

A tsunami triggered a loss of remission.

But now when he’s watching TV he sees

where he went wrong. However clement

there is always the threat of a storm.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

God of the gaps

NASA telescope detects ‘bonanza’ of humungous black holes

The Christian Science Monitor, 29 August 2012

Science reveals the deep fish of mind,

catches synapses thinking thoughts

to which the thinker is blind,

lays claim to the magical night sky,

bottles it, labels its bright outer skin

the afterbirth of all within.

And just when the world was becoming

so like a clock set running

by a maker with better things to do

than watch its slow wind down,

we found out even God can only guess

what happens next, perhaps

placing his bets with the rest of us,

sometimes black, sometimes red,

too busy to fill in the gaps that he left.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Ten novel cultivars of cancer

Scientists hail revolutionary breast cancer breakthrough

The Independent, 19 April 2012

With a paper in Nature the head of the hydra was toppled

and the number of things for a woman to dread decupled;

there's one you get from wearing your genes too tight

and another from smudging jam on the blueprint of your life;

and then there’s letting your helix unfurl like a hernia —

that’s three — four is a writ from your long-suffering mother,

and five a curse announced by a previously mute mutation;

next comes the incurable lure of sweet-cured bacon,

then amassing a critical mass of tear-stained tissue;

and if your permanent tan casts a long, dark shadow,

that’s eight; and those nights on tequila coming roosting home

makes nine: enough for a cat, let alone a mouse.

But if those don’t get you don’t congratulate yourself

just yet, perhaps you've already been lucky far too long.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The infinite, the absolute

Eureka no more: Is the moment of discovery becoming ever harder to pin down?

New Scientist, 7 January 2012

Winter of discovery come

inflating the continuum, moments stretch

over light years and eons, neither here and now

nor there and then; even a dying sigh distend

the universe’s belly, then, like homeopathy,

its infinite expansion renders absolute

the vacuum.

The whole world race away

from the chaser whose grasping vision foils

his feeble cast; the price of living more

than the scattering parts be worth. And who to feed

the defeated, or toss succour to the sparrow

of first snowfall, lost in the infinite,

the absolute?

They say neutrinos overtake light,

they say Higgs boson was sighted at CERN,

they say placental stem cells speed

the cripple’s step, the blind man’s sight, they say

oceans shall froth with methane; and yet, among

this absolute infinity, might this world not be

the blesséd one?


(c) 2012 Slush Poet