Deep Poets Society
Poets share their work at Deep Talks event
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?