"usn" poems
It’s Hard Not To Be Optimistic: An Updated Sonnet to Science
by Michael R. Burch
“DNA has cured deadly diseases and allowed
labs to create animals with fantastic new
features.” ― U.S. News & World Report
It’s hard not to be optimistic
when things are so wondrously futuristic:
when DNA, our new Louie Pasteur,
can effect an autonomous, miraculous cure,
while labs churn out fluorescent monkeys
who, with infinite typewriters, might soon outdo USN&WR’s flunkeys.
It’s hard not to be optimistic
when the world is so delightfully pluralistic:
when Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive,
and Hawking says time can run backwards. We thrive,
befuddled drones, on someone else’s regurgitated nectar,
while our cheers drown out poet-alarmists who might Hector
the Achilles heel of pure science (common sense)
and reporters who tap out supersillyous nonsense.
NOTE: I am a fan of both real science and science fiction, and I like to think I can tell the difference, at least between the two extremes. I feel confident that Schrödinger didn’t think the cat in his famous experiment was both dead and alive. Rather, he was pointing out that we can’t know until we open the box, scratchings and smell aside. While traveling backwards in time is great for science fiction, it seems extremely doubtful as a practical application. And as for DNA curing deadly diseases ... well, it must have created them, so perhaps don’t give it too much credit!
Submitted to U.S. News & World Report
Dear Editor,
While I’m usually a fan of your magazine, as a writer I must take to task the Frankensteinian logic of the excerpt I cited, and I challenge you to publish my “letter” as proof that poets do have a function in the third millennium, even if it is only to suggest that paid writers should not create such outlandish, freakish horrors of the English language.
Somewhat irked, but still a fan,
Michael R. Burch
Keywords/Tags: science, fiction, quantum, physics, Hawking, Schrodinger, cat, DNA, infinite, monkeys, typewriters, Shakespeare, lab, animals, new, features
May 8, 2020
May 8, 2020 at 4:11 PM UTC
my mind
s
p
i
n
s
the colors
all of the COLORS
the cardinal red
the 6 drops
i cannot stay here
i cnnt sty hr’
but my mind
MY MIND
IS
STUCK IN
A RECURSION
MY MIND
IS
STUCK IN
A RECURSION
MY MIND
IS
STUCK IN
A RECURSION
A RECURSION
a
recursion
‘i know’
‘i have to get out of here’
Nov 6, 2017
Nov 6, 2017 at 2:52 PM UTC
Camping on the Edge of Forever
For HM3 Michael Dean Marconett, USN
of happy memory
Wild stars, beyond a Sterno stove’s tame glow,
We’ll live forever as we live this night:
Coffee and cigarettes and comradeship,
Our backs against the sun-warmed Sierras
As the cold falls from infinite darkness
To keep the snow in place another night,
To smile in ancient silence back at you,
To make a glowing, slumberous twilight until dawn.
Those C-rations were good after a day
Of scrambling among prehistoric rocks
Made musical by the dinosaur creek,
Water as cold as the dark end of time.
San Diego glows in the south-southwest,
Silently, inefficiently, light lost.
But you, wild, happy star, will still shine down
On dreaming youths, tonight and other nights,
Counting for us, for them, each millennium.
Jun 14, 2017
Jun 14, 2017 at 6:28 PM UTC