Brolly Dolly
What is it with black umbrellas ?
Only make the weather darker !
When the skies are less than stellar,
Do not make them even starker !
Make our brollies blue and gold,
A private sunbeam to unfold –
The overcast may make us pout,
But when it rains, the sun comes out !
Lazy Eight
Is anything more useless than infinity ?,
When the universe is finite and when ev’rything must cede –
There’s nothing lasts forever, there’s nothing truly limit-free –
So count on up to fine-ity (a number larger than you need.)
For endlessness is not a destination,
And nor is it a something ever-growing –
It simply is a signpost that we pass on our inflation
That always points ahead and reads keep going.
The Bland & The Brutal
This macho rejection of beauty as quaint,
We bask in the ugly in building and paint –
Those worlds of the graceful and subtle all fade,
We cannot return back, because we’re afraid.
Tempus Fudge-It
I held my time within my hands,
And tightly cupped its precious sands,
But held it open to the skies:
Alas, when time can’t flow, it flies.
Arachubiquita
Look ! Spiders ev’rywhere !
Scuttling over ceilings,
Hanging from their danglings,
Watching from the walls.
Webbing here, webbing there,
Going ’bout their dealings,
Lurking legs-a-gangling
Or rolled up into balls.
Let them be, don’t let them scare.
Spiders, spiders ev’rywhere !
M-K-G-F-A-B-O
Doktor Hertzsprung, Doctor Russell,
Why is your diagram such a tussle ?
Why is your axis the wrong way round,
Higher to lower, bluer to redder ?
Does it reveal some secret profound,
Hotter to cooler, younger to deader ?
Your sweeping main sequence is mirrored about,
Your plot’s lost the plot, and your graph’s up the spout.
Actually, I’m being a little unfair here. The original plot was absolute magnitude (aka luminosity) on the y-axis, and the peak wavelength of light on the x (or ‘spectral type’). Since high-energy blue light has many more waves in the same distance as lower-energy red light, so the length between peaks in red light is longer, and thus a higher number. (Incidentally, Omicron2 Eriadne B was the first white dwarf discovered in 1910.)
When it was later realised that the wavelengths directly related to surface tempurature, the latter was substituted, but now the numbers were going down instead of up, and nobody bothered to flip it. But thanks to the wonders of the internet, I was able to rustle up the following:
As the Ghurab Flies
So when you turn to pray in the facing-Mecca way
Do you use the Great Circles or the Rhumbs ?
Though both have got it wrong – for the route that’s shortest-long
Shall be plumbing through the mantel as she comes.
Losing my Wretchedness
Amazing space, how blind and vast,
To fluke-up life like me.
I once had faith, but now at last,
I have infinity.
Omniphonics
The beauty of English is all those who seek it
With all of their Anglisized ears.
The whole world is lis’ning, for evil or good,
Our blessing and curse is to be understood.
The beauty of English is ev’ryone speaks it –
The trouble is, ev’ryone hears.
Epiphany in the Rain
This cannot drown me, nor chill me, nor dampen my mien –
For I have seen something like nothing of all things I’ve seen.
Not from a far world, nor next world, nor somewhere between –
It came from within me, from ev’ry damn neuron and gene.
Rhyming Couplets 