Poetry Friday: Locked In

This is too cool. That's the Orion Nebula M42, and the photo was taken, at my request, by a PROMPT telescope in Chile, and emailed to me. The telescope (and five others) were funded by National Science Foundation Grants, and are primarily used to study gamma ray bursts, but students and teachers in North Carolina also use them to remotely observe the Southern Hemisphere night sky. Try it! Go here to request a picture of your own.

And now, for Poetry Friday:

Locked In


The doctors say he is alive
in there, all his thoughts
as hot as ever,

but his body is frozen,
disconnected from will.
They watch

his brainwaves and teach him
to mark letters with slight
shifts in his alpha

patterns
so he can spell his name
for the applauding staff.

I wonder then: when we die,
do we make the stars to speak
our fiery thoughts?

And do the living, those chill,
earth-locked living, who mark
our cries

on their astronomical
charts, at last applaud
our names?

----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)

Poetry Friday is hosted by AmoXcalli today.