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Newsflash:

StarPoet Newsletter Vol. X, No. IX

Sunday, 01 March 2009 01:00 Last Updated on Sunday, 01 March 2009 00:31

The StarPoet Newsletter
Vol. X, No. IX (March 1, 2009 C.E.)

March already. Winter almost gone. Barack finding that it's harder to be president then it is to be a candidate. But most importantly of all, life springs eternal: Spring Training has begun. I'm looking forward to the first Interstellar World Series.

The smell of rain still distant
Slips through the early morning
By noon the world will be well wet
As will we as we catch our breath

— Lisa Jain Thompson c. 2009 CE

I've got poems, you've got poems, all god's children got poems. I think I need to latch on to some government stimulus, preferably in unsequenced twenty dollar bills.

the cycle

Stumbling March

March stumbles in
Unsure of its season,
Warmer than my childhood,
Cooler than my senescence;

An awkward month
Hung up in adolescence,
Uncertain who it is
Or who it wants to be;

Daffodils burst forth,
Tulips rush close behind,
Weathering both cool rain
And winter's fading struggles.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (March 2009)

President Obama disdains sound bites, and he does not have Bill Clinton's talent for reducing the abstruse to aperçus. We wanted someone smart to gather a bunch of smart people around him to get us out of this fix. But Mr. Obama's egghead manner has failed to soothe a nation with the jits. Maybe he has been so intent on avoiding the stereotype of the Angry Black Man, as he wrote in his memoir, that it's hard for him to connect with and articulate public anger about our diminishment.

Though he demonstrated in the campaign that he has a rare gift for inspiring the country with new belief in itself, Mr. Obama has not yet captured either the grit the moment requires or the fury it provokes. He has not explained in a compelling way why Americans who followed the rules need to sacrifice more to help those who flouted the rules.

-- Maureen Dowd.

watching the waters rise

Venice at Midnight

If I were to survive Venice,
I would be more than happy to go;
For if she sinks beneath the ocean
Before I am lowered into the ground,
What reason should I live
In a future I no longer fit?

We expect a certain continuity
From grandparents to parents to us,
A certain firmness of reality,
A continuous chain of being
From generation to generation.

Time does not stop nor even take a break,
The earth does not suddenly revolve around the moon;
I expect my paradigms to remain constant,
The dimensions I perceive, stable,
In the world I believe in, Venice would not die.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (March 2009)

so much to do when you are an active in the movement

Pink Ribbons and Silver Medals

It so good to be doing something
For that breast cancer thing,
Wearing a pink ribon or a Hard Rock pin,
Choosing the correct make-up,
The right top and running shorts.

How cool it is to be progressive,
Participating in marhes and ten mile walks,
Having our voices heard and televised,
Giving each other awards and honors
While those nasty scientists do the grunt work.

Don't think this is ease or we lack commitment,
It costs a lot of money to be progressive,
Buying all those gowns to attend the ceremonies,
Making the rounds of all those talk shows,
There are meetings to go to, communities to organize.

Being liberal is just one thing after another.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (March 2009)

There are many examples of old, incorrect theories that stubbornly persisted, sustained only by the prestige of foolish but well-connected scientists. ... Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness. .. Thus the yeoman work in any science, and especially physics, is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.

-- Michio Kaku

nocturnal observations

Last Night

Last night I dreamed of Barack Obama
Walking around the edge of the Reflecting Pool;
Lincoln watched on, Washington high above,
I could not hear what Barack was thinking
So I waited with the whole world watching
To see what he might do. Then I awoke,
The dream had vanished, and I stumbled into
The harsh bright light of morning.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (March 2009)

CONCHITA CINTRON

Conchita Cintron, 86, who broke into the male-dominated sport of bullfighting at 13 and became one of the world's first famous female matadors, died Feb. 17 in Lisbon after a heart attack. Ms. Cintron, a native of Peru who became known as "La Diosa Rubia," or "The Blond Goddess," was famous for her bullfighting skills on foot and horseback. Ms. Cintron reportedly killed more than 750 bulls during her career in Europe, Central America and South America.

She was born in 1922 as Concepcion Cintron Verrill, the daughter of a Puerto Rican father and an American mother. She faced her first bull at 13 and made her debut in 1937 at the main arena in Lima, Peru. During the 1940s, Ms. Cintron became one of the most famous women in bullfighting at a time when few women became matadors, whose job it was to maneuver around the animal at close range, then to stab it to death with a sword.

Ms. Cintron was seriously injured in 1949 in Guadalajara, Mexico, when a bull gored her in the thigh. Carried to the ring's infirmary, she pulled away from doctors, returned to the ring and killed the bull. She then fell unconscious and was rushed into emergency surgery.

Ms. Cintron learned bullfighting with Ruy Zarco da Camara, the Portuguese operator of a riding school in Lima.

She retired to marry a Portuguese man, Francisco de Castelo Branco. He was "a lion hunter of noble lineage," the Associated Press reported when they married in 1951.

Ms. Cintron is survived by a son.

-- Barry Hatton, AP

living

And Then They Kissed Me

I kissed a girl,
I kissed a boy,
I've made love to both
But never and.

I've been the aggressor,
I've been the receiver,
The top, the bottom,
The in-between.

If you move me,
If I'm single,
If I fill
Your momentary desire.

I care less what you think
My skin color might be,
And I don't give a damn
If you are scarlet.

If we make love,
If we move slowly,
We'll both wake up smiling
In the morning.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (March 2009)

openly starpoet

Fireflies

Space, like a drunken warp drive engineer,
Dreams more stars than we will every see,
Everywhere we look there are suns and galaxies,
As far as far as light has ever travelled.

For the human race to be here alone,
For this single planet, this island earth,
To be the only harborer of sentient life,
Would require a creator who aborts his creations
On any world where RNA begins its long march
From mud to ocean to the shoreline of the universe.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (March 2009)

The value the world sets upon motives is often grossly unjust and inaccurate. Consider, for example, two of them: mere insatiable curiosity and the desire to do good. The latter is put high above the former, and yet it is the former that moves one of the most useful men the human race has yet produced: the scientific investigator. What actually urges him on is not some brummagem idea of Service, but a boundless, almost pathological thirst to penetrate the unknown, to uncover the secret, to find out what has not been found out before. His prototype is not the liberator releasing slaves, the good Samaritan lifting up the fallen, but a dog sniffing tremendously at an infinite series of rat-holes.

-- H. L. Menken

from a seventh floor window

Snow Skies

Snow skies, warm ground,
White haze all around,
Dark earth and asphalt down below.

Late winter, early spring,
Weather fluctuating between,
Teflon coated world lightly moves on.

Snow stops, gray skies remain,
Afternoon brings scattered rain,
Narcissus quickly rise chased by tulips.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (March 2009)

more starpoet anyone?

You Need to Whiteboard That Out

Beneath dark skies, dreamers dream
Of distant stars and planetfalls
Filled with romance and adventure,
Great discoveries, a thousand new races,
A galactic library of infinite knowledge,
A solution for dying and a chance for hot
Monkey sex with persons as of yet unknown.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (March 2009)

...Einstein, twenty-six years old, only three years away from crude privation, still a patent examiner, published in the Annalen der Physik in 1905 five papers on entirely different subjects. Three of them were among the greatest in the history of physics. One, very simple, gave the quantum explanation of the photoelectric effect--it was this work for which, sixteen years later he was awarded the Nobel prize. Another dealt with the phenomenon of Brownian motion, the apparently erratic movement of tiny particles suspended in a liquid: Einstein showed that these movements satisfied a clear statistical law. This was like a conjuring trick, easy when explained: before it, decent scientists could still doubt the concrete existence of atoms and molecules: this paper was as near direct proof of their concreteness as a theoretician could give. The third paper was the special theory of relativity, which quietly amalgamated space, time and matter into one fundamental unity.

This last paper contains no references and quotes no authority. All of them are written in a style unlike any other theoretical physicist's. They contain very little mathematics. There is a good deal of verbal commentary. The conclusions, the bizarre conclusions, emerge as though with the greatest of ease: the reasoning is unbreakable. It looks as though he had reached the conclusions by pure thought, unaided, without listening to the opinions of others. To a surprisingly large extent, that is precisely what he had done.

It is pretty safe to say that, so long as physics lasts, no one will again hack out three major breakthroughs in one year.

-- C. P. Snow

bits, pieces, this and that

Fragments 2009

Crescent moon, drawn and quartered,
Clouds drifting uptrack, right to left,
Sun a half hour below the horizon,
Dew on the ground not the air.

Crystal jewels above the sunflowers,
Crimson dragonflies mate profusely.

The once and future poet,
For an instant, an instant mine:
My voice, my hand,
My imagination,
My dance.

Diet soda, regular fat,
Aging body, wider hips;
Feet between pedicures
That resemble an elephant's.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (March 2009)

rememberance

Vito

One day my grandfather
Told his daughter, my aunt,
That before long he would not need
The things that decorated his room
- He was a hundred and two
And in a rest home, you see,
For at one oh two your children
Are in their seventies and eighties
And cannot give you the care you need --
Then, as an explanation, said
She should take everything home
Rather than wait until later.

Two weeks later, Grandpa was dead,
Having concluded that he had seen enough
-- Two world wars, Korea and Viet Nam,
Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, Willie and Sandy,
The three Oakland A's world championships,
The first automobile, Neil on the Moon,
The Depression, the Kennedys, and Richard Nixon,
Radio and television, antibiotics, and his wife,
My grandmother, who died after 65 years of marriage --
And all of his children, and all of his grandchildren,
Could survive just as well without him.

Thirty years later, I am not at all sure.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (February 2009)

The Sureness of Being

I think there's a world market for about five computers.

-- Thomas Watson, Founder of IBM

Space Travel is utter bilge.

-- Richard Woolley, U. K. Astronomer Royal, 1956, one year before the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union