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Poets share their work at Deep Talks event
Constance Walter

For our Deep Talks: Deep Poets Society event, we asked our readers, audience members and employees to prove their love for deep science by writing and sharing a poem. Most were too shy to read, but we did get a few submissions. 

MONDagues and CapuLUX

By Mark Hanhardt, experiment support scientist

But soft! What light through yonder xenon breaks?

It is scintillation, and a WIMP is the sun!

Arise, fair WIMP, and kill the envious MOND

Who is already sick and pale with an inability to explain the Bullet Cluster among other physical phenomenon,

That thou, her maid, art far more physically plausible than she.

Be not her maid since she is envious.

 

Neutrino, Neutrino

By Mark Hanhardt

Neutrino, neutrino,

Why do you hide?

When answers to questions

Only you can provide?

Your existence is known

But your detection is squirrely.

Your resistance to finding

Has made us quite surly.

 

Neutrino, neutrino,

What do you weigh?

Are you embarrassed?

So shy you can't say?

We know you have mass

But we don't know how much.

That absent weight datum

Leaves us in a clutch.

 

Neutrino, neutrino

What color are you?

Are you even too small

To have a hue?

Could you be crimson,

Or azure or orange?

We don't know- wait, what?

Dangit, what rhymes with orange?

 

Gravity Waves

By Peggy Norris, deputy director Education and Outreach

In a time long ago, in a galaxy far away, two neutron stars dance.

Doomed by mutual attraction, they circle ever inward in an intricate tango.

Until, in one glorious moment, they merge - sending their news to the universe…

A gentle ripple in the fabric of space, a flash of light, a mist of newly minted gold.

Not to be mistaken for their brutish cousins, the black holes -

When they merge, it’s Wham Bam Thank You Mam!

Then – nothing…

 

Honoring The Past Looking To The Future

By Thomas F. Regan, ERT lead, safety consultant 

Legacy unleashed in quantum capacity

by past honored and future glimpsed

mining knowledge and giving released

dark drifts enlighten that dark matter matters

accelerated light reveals potentiality

as character enthusiasm and force convulse

multiple disciplines revealed via common goal

quest for life yields new horizons

once again creation explored

where warriors would go to wait for visions

and to speak to the Great Spirit

physicists chemists technicians students descend.

 

Dance

By Robyn Varland, lab custodian

One must be still to dance

As the mind will prance

Hide and seek is the game

Curiosity untamed

The element of the dance

Might leave you in a trance

Saved by the rhythm in the unknown

Opens a big window by chance

 

Quiet Mind

Robyn Varland

A quiet mind is full of noise
Loud enough to give it a voice
Answers get deployed
Curiosity ends in a poise

 

Seek

by Catherine Polley, Deep Talks audience member

They seek them here.

They seek them there.

They seek them everywhere.

Those elusive neutrinos.

Are they in heaven or?

Are they in hell?

No one knows.

 

Elusive Gold

By Catherine Polley

Deep down in the caverns of the mine where men no longer moil for yellow gold,

In the miles of shafts and drifts, a new type of miner seeks a different type of gold.

From all over the world these miners seek this elusive gold.

Not a speck of dust or a ray of light reaches these chambers where is sought the gold.

Will they find the stake as many did those long years ago?

Will they leave empty handed in their search for this elusive gold?