So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back. The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamedįor all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloonsįor peace. His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would riseĪs if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending My father spent whole seasonsīowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find. When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks, In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.

They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said

The poem is Smith’s quest to bring lyrical and cinematic language to, as she herself frames it, “this real mystery, the universe that we belong to, that we’re at home in and yet such strangers of, in a way.” Please enjoy: Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey - found in her sublime poetry collection Life on Mars ( public library).

Smith.Īt The Universe in Verse, Smith read the final section of her long, beautiful poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” - a title borrowed from Arthur C.

One of those early engineers was the father of Pulitzer-winning poet Tracy K. Half a century after the inception of Hubble’s Law, in the late 1970s, engineers began work on an astronomical apparatus more ambitious than any previous human attempt to observe the universe: the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched into orbit in 1990. Her data later became the foundation upon which Edwin Hubble formulated what is now known as Hubble’s Law - the first observational indication that the universe is expanding. At the turn of the twentieth century, Henrietta Swan Leavitt - one of the remarkable astronomers known as the Harvard Computers, women who did significant cosmological work long before they could vote - made a discovery that allowed astronomers to calculate the distance between Earth and faraway galaxies for the first time.

Life on mars k smith