Category: science poems

Ladybug Beetles

I wrote this poem quickly for #writeout after the annual Fall Ladybug Beetle Infestation. I can’t help but see this event as connected to a general sense of hubris, that we can control the natural world and make it do what we want.

ladybug beetles

the ladybug beetles arrived today.
hordes of them
tapping on the windows,
squeezing through the cracks
in the front door,
nestling in the clothes
I left on the line this last warm
October day filled with sun.

all night long
farmers harvested soybeans,
frost-killed and dry.
combine lights.
dust. and then
a cloud of beetles.

a cloud of beetles
flew in from the soybeans. this being
just one more small
disaster,
another sign of hubris.
some genius introduced them
from a far away land
to eat the aphids
that were lowering the
yield of the monoculture-soybeans.
well, they decimated the natives
(this always happens)
so, while

not a climate crisis
or a cancer cluster,
a cloud of beetles arrived today,
another sign of hubris,
small,
and familiar.

— steve peterson

Here is me reading the poem:

 

Erosion Questions

Devonian fossils from the Rockford Fossil Bed

This week geologists came to talk about the Decorah Impact Crater, which got me thinking about change on a geologic timeframe.

This poem was inspired by Amy Ludwig VanDerWater’s, Poems are Teachers, “Try on a Pattern from Nature” p. 117. In this case, the pattern is the big time-frame pattern of geologic time: Create. Destroy. Create. One of my goals is to use April Poetry Month to explore this terrific resource.

Erosion Questions

he said the meteorite struck during the Mid-Ordovician,
right where we stand now; that
the crater filled with water and
became a brackish pond, or even part of a shallow sea, that
over time it filled with mud; that
it teemed with life, that this mud turned to shale, which then
eroded off the rest of the landscape except
for the crater because something that is already missing
cannot go away; he said that
the fine sediments preserved even soft-bodied creatures well enough that
they could even be named; that
he has examined only one cubic meter of shale; that
95% of the species in the shale no one had ever seen before; that
without this crater an entire world of creatures
would have been lost to time; and
I wonder: what of these lost worlds, and
what of ours, and
why does this make my heart ache so?

– Steve Peterson

The Age of Sunlight

A moment’s reflection on a refraction.

And this video:

The Age of Sunlight

I once heard that light takes
tens of thousands of years to travel from
the center of the Sun to its outer edge,
that it is way older than we think, that
beginning with the fusion of
atoms in the core, light reflects
back upon itself and outward,
bouncing off protons
like a hall of mirrors,
until it finally escapes the Sun’s surface
and begins its journey
into dark and empty space –

Yet, one bright shaft,
intercepted by the Moon,
full on this cold February night,
glances toward Earth, then refracts
through a thin layer of crystalline snow
that had fallen silently as evening arrived
and the clouds lifted, so when
I lean to gather a final
load of firewood for the stove,
the empty field is filled with diamonds.
Is this your journey also? So improbable?
So filled with wonder?

— Steve Peterson