Photo by Mikhail Gordeev

Last Thursday was another Science Cafe at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science. This time we heard a talk about the Juno space probe which went into orbit of Jupiter on the Fourth of July. After the talk Tara Lynne Groth, Angie Kirby and I read the poems we’d written during the presentation. The text of my poem appears below but I recommend watching the whole event. If you want to skip to the poetry, advance the video to the 62 minute mark.

Juno Arrives

We humans, we puny humans,
have known about Jupiter
for thousands of years,
the brightest star wandering
the night sky.

But it wasn’t until Galileo
focused his first telescope
on the King of the Gods
that we met Io, Europa,
Ganymede and Callisto.
They didn’t erupt
fully formed
from his mighty head
four hundred years ago.
They were there all along.
We humans, we puny humans,
just couldn’t see them
with our poor animal eyes.

Now we send pioneers and voyagers.
We weave a cocoon of orbits
with a beautiful robot
in a titanium dress,
whose eyes see below infrared
and past ultraviolet
until she’s ripped apart,
flying too close to her man.

From a bright light
in the night sky
to touching another planet
in just a few hundred years.
We are clever monkeys,
aren’t we?