Monday 23 August 2010

A Rhapsody

The night drew close and the stars screamed for space,
The moon flatly refused to enter the race,
She calmly collected the songs to her love,
Then wrapped them in raptures for the heavens above,
The music was composed by a gypsy’s heart,
For only the homeless could play the part.

The songs were lost to the darkness of space,
The grieving moon turned away her face,
Singing, 'Age will tell so they say,
Why can’t you listen to yesterday today?
Why does it take all that I have to give?
When will you ever learn how to live?'

The gypsy wept for the waning moon,
His violin echoed sounds played too soon,
Nowhere was light to reflect her face,
Nowhere was light to equal her grace,
The wild sounds climbed every musical scale,
And tore asunder a well-worn veil.

Simplicity wins what complexity loses,
The answer will be whatever life chooses.
But throughout our entire worldly domains,
Despite all efforts the question remains,
Why does the gypsy play with strings?
Only gravity knows what that song brings.

The deepest space between the lines,
Lost the way that space-time defines,
Without gravity the song must fly fast and far,
With guidance from only a blue wandering star*,
This picture is mounted by the unknown,
Beyond which the frame for life is shown.

*HE 0437-5439 is one of the fastest stars ever detected fleeing our galaxy at 2.5 million kilometers per hour. Since no star travels that quickly under normal circumstances astronomers believe something 'exotic' must have occurred. The star has been traced back to where it has come from using Hubble by measuring the stars direction of motion in the sky. They point directly to the centre of the Milky Way.
There it had a encounter of the third kind with the massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy.
Once part of a triple system one star was swallowed by the black hole while the other two gained momentum and merged to form a blue star that fled through the galaxy's halo.
Such stars are called blue wanderers or stragglers.

Astronomers hope that despite its enormous speed it may help us to probe for clumps of dark matter in the galaxy's halo whose gravity is affecting the star's motion.

2 comments:

Andy said...

It was so lovely to see not one but four entries from you. Again I can not find enough words to express my delight at your fabulous words and pictures

Rose~* said...

Beautiful poem, Liz.