Explore Poems: Science

It turns out you can kill the earth,
Crack it open like an egg.
It turns out you can murder the sea,
Poison your own children
Without even thinking about it.

Goodbye passenger pigeon, once
So numerous men threw nets over trees
And fed you to pigs....

Think
how many long years
this tree waited as a seed
for an animal or bird or wind or rain
to maybe carry it to maybe the right spot
where again it waited months for seasons to change
until time and temperature were fine enough to...

Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Teachers say it's the end of the world.

At school, they instruct us to look up
and watch the Cuban-cursed sky.
Search for a streak of light.
Listen for a piercing shriek,
the whistle that will warn us
as poisonous...

Universe
                     Galaxy
                                     Solar System
                     ...

Marvelous
Opaque
Orb.
Night-light
          for the world.

Hybridization, cross-breeding, evolution:
He takes to new theories
like a puppy takes to ice cream.
We whisper that our Green-Thumb Boy
is the black Mendel, that Darwin
would have made good use of Carver's eyes.
So clear his gift for observation:
the best collector I've ever known.
I...

Arachis Hypogaea may have been
smuggled to North America by slaves
who hid seeds of survival in their hair.
Despite your nakedness, the chains, the stench,
if white men did not eat you, you might come
to a cruel land where, tended by moonlight
and exhaustion, your...

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured...

Oh, fly,
you flew
onto
my leaf
and not
my food.
What a relief!
For on my food
you'd bring me grief
as you're
a vector of
disease.
But you on leaf?
My mind's at ease.
And there is much
to please
my eye.
For oh, you are
a lovely fly.
Just
do not go
and multiply.

Willie had a stubborn wart
upon his middle toe.
Regardless, though, of what he tried
the wart refused to go.

So Willie went and visited
his family foot physician,
who instantly agreed
it was a stubborn wart condition.

The doctor tried to squeeze the wart.
He tried to twist...

Baby ate a microchip,
Then grabbed a bottle, took a sip.
He swallowed it and made a beep,
And now he’s thinking pretty deep.

He’s downloading his ABCs
And calculating 1-2-3s.
He’s memorizing useless facts
While doing Daddy’s income tax.

He’s processing, and now he thrives
On feeding his...

When you were building the i-10 bypass,
one of   your dozers, moving earth
at the center of a great pit,
slipped its thick blade beneath
the water table, slicing into the earth’s
wet palm, and the silt moistened
beneath the...

Up beyond the
Night sky, an
Indigo darkness like
Velvet
Embraces the farthest
Reaches of the mind,
Sun, moon, stars,
Everything.

I.  Spring
 
We burst forth,
crisp green squads
bristling with spears.
We encircle the pond.
 
II.  Summer
 Brown velvet plumes
bob jauntily. On command,
our slim, waving arrows
rush toward the sun.
 
III.  Fall
 
All red-winged generals
desert us.  Courage
clumps and fluffs
like bursting pillows.
 
IV. Winter
 
Our feet are full of ice.
Brown bones rattle...

I am the Earth
And the Earth is me.
Each blade of grass,
Each honey tree,
Each bit of mud,
And stick and stone
Is blood and muscle,
Skin and bone.

And just as I
Need every bit
Of me to make
My body fit,
So Earth needs
Grass and stone and tree
And...

That afternoon in mid-July,
Two pilgrims watched from distant space
The moon ballooning in the sky.
They rose to meet it face-to-face.

Their spidery spaceship, Eagle, dropped
Down gently on the lunar sand.
And when the module's engines stopped,
Rapt silence fell across the land.

The first man...

sun
sunwarm
sunwarm on back
sunwarm on back legs
sunwarm on back legs loosens
            my heart
            my heart beats
            my heart beats faster
            in sunwarm my heart beats faster
                        I flex
                        I flex legs
                        I flex legs loose with sunwarm
                       ...

I grow in places
others can’t,
 
where wind is high
and water scant.
 
I drink the rain,
I eat the sun;
 
before the prairie winds
I run.
 
I see, I sprout,
I grow, I creep,
 
and in the ice
and snow, I sleep.
 
On steppe or veld
or pampas dry,
 
beneath the grand,
enormous sky,
 
I...

 Sun
slant low,
chill seeps into black
water. No more days of bugs
and basking. Last breath, last sight
of light and down I go, into the mud. Every
year, here, I sink and settle, shuttered like a
shed.  Inside, my eyes close, my heart slows
to its...

It's a bug's world of intrigue and mystery,
with humans a blip in their history.
So when insects flitter and scurry past us
Take note, because they may outlast us!