Bert Flitcroft, "From Standing Stones to the Stars"

Bert Flitcroft was born and brought up in Lancashire but now lives in the Midlands. He now has four collections of poetry published: Singing Puccini at the Kitchen Sink, Thought-Apples, Just Asking, and Seeing the Light. Recently he has made available a fifth, a "new and selected" entitled From Standing Stones to the Stars: History and Science: 30 Poems.

He is an Arts Council prize-winning poet, was Poet in Residence at the Southwell Poetry Festival and has performed at a number of leading national festivals including The Edinburgh International Book Festival. He was Staffordshire Poet Laureate 2015–17 and curated the on-line Staffordshire Poetry Collection. 

He has worked as resident poet with one of our "National Treasures," The Wedgwood Collection at the V&A; as resident poet with the prestigious R.I.B.A. exhibition "The Road Less Travelled"; and recently as part of the University of Keele project "Labelling the Museum."

Bert offers a professional mentoring service and has a long and successful history of running workshops and giving readings, not just to local poetry groups but in libraries, arts centres, gardens, galleries, museums. His website is here. 

About From Standing Stones to the Stars, by Bert Flitcroft

This collection  includes a few new poems alongside poems published in Bert’s first four collections. Glancing through these he realised how many of them reflect his long-standing interest in History and Science, and the variety in form and structure this has involved. This collection is designed to appeal to a wider-than-usual audience as well as the general poetry reader. Many readers will find this collection both a pleasure and a rewarding, if occasionally challenging, experience.

From From Standing Stones to the Stars

Re-reading Jane Austen

in the age of quantum entanglement

It is a truth universally acknowledged

that a single heavenly body, in possession

of space, must be in want of a soul mate. 

Between such bodies there is always gravity. 

And who is to say this isn't a form of love?

Whole galaxies may be holding hands, 

finding themselves entangled

at a subatomic level, sharing words of love. 

And, for all we know, causing each other 

both joy and heartache.

Let us imagine two heavenly bodies

and name them Elizabeth and Darcy,

separate them by unacknowledged forces

a physicist might label Pride and Prejudice.

Two planets, mere particles, seemingly 

destined to circle around each other forever.

There is much that is mysterious about love,

but two particles can exist in many places

at the same time yet be connected, 

and, though separate, can influence and refine 

each other's behaviour.

So who is to deny that our two particles,

one in a high-waisted white gown

and one in a tailcoat with white cravat,

could be entangled at this subatomic level,

discovering that they share an affinity

created by a chance encounter at a ball

or an innocent visit with an aunt.

In the light of quantum entanglement

Jane Austen was much wiser than we think.

With such knowledge would the tale

of Romeo and his Juliet, two universal 

star-crossed lovers, have to end as it did?

Or Abelard and Heloise suffer such a fate?

Intensive care

Back from theatre, again, the room quiet 

but for your breathing and the syllables 

of monitors and voices in the corridor,

your eyes closed in opiate delirium 

you whispered, "I’m being chased 

around the room by a mashed potato."

And, after a silence, "Is that you, dad?"

and you squeezed my hand.

To see your pale flesh turn red and swell,

a doctor's pen daily marking out the fronts,

was to witness Life reduced 

to mortal combat between microbes.

If only Love could be a friendly bacteria

we could drip-feed into veins.

But for now at least, thank God for surgeons 

and men of science, and Fleming.

And yes, thank God for love.

Had you gone before your time, the natural 

order disturbed, I would have needed 

your absence, the silences, made bearable; 

convinced myself you were still somewhere:

in the low clouds, your voice in the wind,

your hands part of the warm rain.

Heaven would be good. That’s what it’s for.

Fiona Theokritoff, "New Uses for a Wand"

Fiona Theokritoff is a poet and educator, with a science background. She lives in Nottinghamshire, and has worked as a Creative Writing tutor since 2017. She did her Creative Writing MA at Nottingham Trent University in 2019, and as one half of Wine and Words, she performs her work at book festivals and other book events across Nottinghamshire. In the 1980s, Fiona studied Ecology and Environmental Science, and went on to have careers in publishing and as a health practitioner. Her first book, New Uses for a Wand, was published in June 2024 by Five Leaves. Her work has appeared in poetry journals including Mslexia, The Interpreter’s House, Under the Radar, Ink Sweat and Tears and Consilience, a journal created to forge connections between the sciences and creative arts.

About New Uses for a Wand, by Fiona Theokritoff 
New Uses for a Wand is a book about transformation, from the way our world has transformed myths and old magic into science, to the transformations that we as humans experience: those we reach for and those that are thrust upon us. 

In this wide-ranging pamphlet there are poems about lapis lazuli, the Periodic Table, the James Webb Space Telescope, and about people being in love, growing old, facing loss and taking revenge.     

You can read more about New Uses for a Wand on the publisher’s website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from the collection.

From New Uses for a Wand

The One Thing Brian Cox Taught Me

At the outer edges of our eyeballs,

184 million rod cells stand

ready for this low-light moment.

We are seeing stars.

The tiny lights hover,

we are bathed in photon streams,

two lovers full of whispered dreams,

starlight from faraway and forever

        star light

          star bright

        shine on my retina

                  tonight

A 13 billion light-year journey ends,

illuminates us   with a flash

of rhodopsin       workaday magic.

Ancient light is

        perceived,

        captured,

        persists,

                dances

            free in our eyes,

answering the lovers’ eternal question…

so it is true, that nothing        in this moment

has existed        in quite this way before.

 

Photosynthesis

          Magnesium  - Mg2+ - activates enzymes in phosphate metabolism. 

          Constituent of chlorophyll. 

Biology: A Functional Approach, MBV Roberts

The Magus takes centre stage,

and in his own limelight,

creates alchemy

with simple wandering players:

                             sunlight

6CO₂ + 6H₂O –––––––→ C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂

Photons cascade through stacks

of green lamellae coins, exchange

one currency for another.

Sugar strings will become

coiled sugar rings,

a chorus line of can-can dancers,

energy locked in their sweet skirts.

Released, that sun-sparked flash

means a flower will bloom

a grub will feed.

Green blood throbs.

Silent Magus sits.

Sue Hubbard, "Radium Dreams"

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist, broadcaster and art critic. She has won numerous prizes and, as The Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet, created London’s largest public art poem, Eurydice, at Waterloo station, which has now been carved in Portland stone and permanently placed in the crypt of St. John’s, Waterloo.

Her poems have appeared in The Irish Times, The Observer, The London Magazine and many leading poetry magazines and anthologies. They have been read on Radio 3,  Radio 4 and RTE, and recorded for The Poetry Sound Archive.  Twice a Hawthornden Fellow and twice awarded bursaries to Yaddo, US, she has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia and in 1999 was awarded a major Arts Council Award. She has published four previous collections of poetry, Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station and The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), Swimming to Albania (Salmon Poetry). God’s Little Artist, on the life of Gwen John, is due later in 2023 from Seren.

She has also published a collection of short stories, Rothko’s Red (Salt) and three novels, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis), Girl in White (Pushkin Press), Rainsongs (Duckworth, Overlook Press, US, Mercure de France and Yilin Press, China). Her fourth novel, Flatlands, is due from Pushkin Press UK and US, and Mercure de France in late spring 2023.

As an art critic she has been a regular contributor to The Independent, Time Out, The New Statesman, The London Magazine, and published a book of essays on art, Adventures in Art (Other Criteria). Her website is here. 

 

About Radium Dreams, by Sue Hubbard

For Radium Dreams I invited the artist Eileen Cooper RA to team up with me to pay homage to one of the world’s greatest female scientists, Marie Curie. Our poems, drawings and collages form an exhibition at the Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, along with an accompanying book, that follow her through her Polish childhood, her studies and research in Paris, her marriage and very public affair, giving texture and depth to her extraordinary life. It is more than eighty years since her death, but her story remains as compelling as ever.

My poems, accompanied by Eileen Cooper’s drawings and collages, conjure Curie’s life through closely observed moments of struggle, tenderness and joy. Both exhibition and book explore the theme of creative support: between Marie Curie and her sister, and between the scientist and her husband, Pierre Curie. This is reflected in the collaboration between a female poet and artist and resonates with The Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards, which was created by women as a college dedicated to educating academically outstanding young women.

Marie Curie’s own feminism was always demonstrated by her actions rather than by theories or words. She believed that progress in science would benefit the world and broke down barriers to pursue new ideas and theories, never allowing herself to be defined by the standards of beauty of her day or the behaviour conventionally expected from a woman. When she got married, she chose to do so in a plain dark gown that she could later use in the lab. Would she have described herself as a feminist? Whilst she was concerned with the education of young women, her abiding interest was always science and the truths it revealed. Stubborn and determined, she believed that knowledge equalled freedom. The men in her life, her husband Pierre, and her lover Paul Langevin, were colleagues with whom she shared her intellectual passions, giving weight to the words of the American writer, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that “There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. Might as well speak of a female liver.” Marie Curie was a woman of conviction and courage. Radium Dreams presents her not only as brilliant, intense and uncompromising but also as passionate, flawed and compellingly human.

You can see more information about the exhibition and the collection on the Women's Art Collection website here. Below, you can read two sample poems from Radium Dreams. 

 

From Radium Dreams

Sorbonne
 
She sets up the kitchen chair,
her petroleum lamp,
a porcelain washbasin
 
printed with a rose
in the attic room of Rue Flatters.
Lives a monastic existence
 
patching and mending
her shiny, old-fashioned dress.
Doesn’t even know
 
how to make soup,
survives on buttered bread and tea,
faints in the tiny boxroom.
 
The laboratory is home,
its brass instruments, bell jars,
and test tubes with their brew of elements.
 
If only she can move them
close enough, she knows
that hydrogen atoms will fuse.
 
Standing in her linen smock
among the men, she rehearses
who she’s about to become,
 
steps forwards,
burette and Bunsen burner in hand.
She’ll not be found wanting.

 
Uranic Rays
 
Once they’d have called her
an alchemist for her pains.
 
Now, moving through the laboratory
among glass wash bottles,
 
Bunsen burners, the brass microscope,
quiet as an inhale of breath,
 
a wooden chemistry bench to her left,
the ionization chamber and electrometer
 
on her right,
she follows Becquerel’s experiments
 
to expose uranium salts to sunlight,
to see if radiation -
 
discovered one cloudy day by chance -
can be spontaneously emanated,
 
pass through metal foil to print,
ghost-like, on a photographic plate,
 
She wants to discover the cause
of this force, which seems
 
to violate Carnot’s law
that energy can be transformed,
 
(though like Time or God 
never be created or destroyed).
 
Now, lying beside her sleeping Pierre,
she dreams of particle waves,
 
an invisible necklace of opaline ash,
illuminating her bleached skin.
   

Suzannah Evans, "Space Baby"

 

Suzannah Evans, photograph by Joe Horner

Suzannah Evans is a poet, Creative Writing tutor and editor based in Sheffield. Her poetry has been widely published in magazines including Magma, The Rialto, The North, Poetry Review, Butcher's Dog, Poetry Wales and The Guardian's Poem of The Week. Her debut collection Near Future was published by Nine Arches Press in November 2018. Suzannah was the winner of a Gladstone’s Library residency for this book and spent a month living and writing at the library in 2019. In 2021 she received a Northern Writers’ Award for her work-in-progress collection Space Baby, awarded by Andrew McMillan, published by Nine Arches Press in June 2022.

Cover by Ayham Jabr

About Space Baby

Space Baby, the second collection by Suzannah Evans, asks difficult questions about the Earth, its beings, and what lies ahead for them: how do we look to the future on a planet that’s burning? How do we come to terms with our grief, and what can we believe in? If the human race destroys what we have, where will we go?

In this dystopian, searching book, Evans mixes absurdity and wit with speculative, and serious themes. Here, we encounter artificial intelligence and robots that will ‘cuddle you to sleep,’ the melting permafrost and all the surprises it reveals, as well as the very first human baby born in space. Ultimately, Evans writes to acknowledge our responsibilities and interconnectedness with earth and all its lifeforms, as well as to our future generations. These are vivid, prescient poems of existence, and survival, which ask how we can still find joy on a ruined planet.

You can see more information about Space Baby on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From Space Baby, by Suzannah Evans

That smile 

                  is yours, that frown

is mine – he’s ours

and we are changed – we pace 

gallantly across the landing 

to check on him when he cries

we lay aside our bedtime reading

we marvel at the workings 

of his tiny body

we smell faintly of rusks. 

The moors have been on fire

for weeks now, the sheep

got coughs and were evacuated

we take first-birthday photos

under a bitumen sky. He’s heavier 

every time I pick him up. 

Cement-coloured pigeons feast

urgently on the bird table

while he observes for hours.

When I take him out to play

I carry a mum-satchel packed

for all eventualities. It bashes

at my hip when I try to walk anywhere.

I change his nappy on a park bench

and people walking cavachons

stop to tell me I’m doing it wrong. 

He rips the heads off damp daisies

pockets snail shells and pinecones

won’t let me throw any of it away.

Pamba he says Polabar, Sealine 

and as he learns their names 

they disappear forever. It’s not his fault

but the coincidence is unsettling. 

I cuddle him, he says Armuddyloo 

wetly into my neck. I give him milk

and mashed banana. Dairy farming! 

He exclaims. Food miles! 

Ash fairies from the fires 

are falling on the flowerbeds

we watch them before bedtime

as they glow in the blue-black,

scrunch up like cooling stars.

We’ve invented a game 

in which we dust the kale plants 

and carrot tops every morning.

His laugh is like the tap water

it chuckles before it gets going. 

 

Skip to the End

Betelgeuse looks ordinary 

up on Orion’s shoulder 

as I walk home with shopping bags 

that sink red dents into my hands. 

Maybe it’s already gone

supernova and down here 

we’re just making the best of it,

waiting for the visuals. 

Who doesn’t want to witness 

the last vomit of a star 

splashed lurid across the cosmos 

like an overripe peach leaking 

wet and gold on a fresh shirt.

Come on I say as if that 

can nudge the star through each decay

it has yet to experience.

I often find myself racing 

to the ends of things. 

I hate that I won’t be there  

as my friends clink and toast my life

she was a planner they’ll say 

a worrier as the sky 

above them bursts formidable 

into an oil painting on fire. 

 

Tania Hershman, "and what if we were all allowed to disappear"

Tania Hershman, photo by Naomi Woddis

and what if we were all allowed to disappear is Tania Hershman's seventh book. Tania's poetry pamphlet, How High Did She Fly, joint winner of Live Canon's 2019 Poetry Pamphlet Competition, was published in 2019. Her debut poetry collection, Terms & Conditions, is published by Nine Arches Press and her third short story collection, Some Of Us Glow More Than Others, by Unthank Books. Tania is also the co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers' & Artists' Companion (Bloomsbury, 2014), the co-creator of @OnThisDayShe, and the curator of short story hub ShortStops. She has a PhD in Creative Writing inspired by particle physics. Tania was recently writer-in-residence in the Southern Cemetery in Manchester, and made a radio programme about her residency, Who Will Call Me Beloved.  Hear her read her work on SoundCloud and find out more on her website here.

Her new book, and what if we were all allowed to disappear, is a collage of poetry, prose and prose/poem hybrids. It's a story of fragmentation, collision, absence and presence. Inspired by particle physics, Tania plays with words and narrative to create new shapes and stories, asking the reader, "What does it mean to be in pieces? What might it mean to be whole?" It's published by Guillemot Press on March 4 2020, and you can see more details here. Below, Tania introduces the book, and you can read a sample from it. 

By Tania Hershman

This is a version of the book I wrote for my PhD, for which I took inspiration from particle physics to look at the idea of parts and wholes. I have a BSc in Maths and Physics, but was never cut out to be a scientist. I became a science journalist, and slowly slowly moved towards my first love: fiction. When I started writing short stories - and then later, poetry -  I didn't want to leave the science behind so I played with it, using articles about science, and then time spent with scientists themselves, as inspiration. 

For the PhD, I took this to a whole new level. I had a particle physicist as an external supervisor, and went and sat in on some of her lectures because particle physics has evolved over the past 25 years! I immersed myself, not only in physics, but in everything to do with parts and wholes. Which, as it turns out, is pretty much everything. Every topic has something to say about what “part” means, what “whole” is, how something can be one, the other, or even both. I followed tangents and went in such fascinating directions, from fractals to Gestalt psychology. 

And while researching these topics, I was also experimenting on what I called “particle fiction”: books made of parts that were intended to work as coherent wholes. Not just chapters, something odder, more disjointed. The books I looked at in detail – and in one case physically took apart – were Bluets by Maggie Nelson, An Acre of Barren Ground by Jeremy Gavron, and Mr Fox by Helen Oyeyemi. When I say “experimented,” I came at it like a scientist, taking measurements, then plotting results on graphs and pie charts. I had such fun. The idea was to see how these books worked and then create my own. 

The result was and what if we were all allowed to disappear. I never explain anything that I write, I will never tell a reader what I think it's “about,” because everything - especially the shortest and most experimental things - is a co-creation with the reader. I don't know what anyone will make of this book, in which prose morphs into poetry and vice versa and there are many gaps left for the reader to fill in. I really would love to hear if and how it speaks to people. 

I can't quite believe this odd hybrid book found a publisher! I couldn't be more delighted with how the excellent Guillemot Press took what I'd done – which is formatted very precisely, printing the PhD was a bit of a nightmare – and came up with creative ways to present it, including pages made of tracing paper. And the GOLD COVER. Oh my. It's beyond anything I could have dreamed of. You don't need to know anything about, or have any interest in, particle physics to read this book. It contains parts which I hope work as a whole, and it looks at the idea of taking things apart and what is revealed. I will say no more about it, here is a little taster. 


Susy sits in the waiting room. She feels like there is something she's forgotten. Although they did not ask her to bring anything. Susy is not sure what they want. She is also not sure exactly what this place is. She wonders if they are watching her. She looks around. 
Susy is worried that she has left the gas on, or the taps, a door unlocked, a window open. She sees herself before she leaves the house, closing, switching off, holding keys. Susy breathes. 
They call her name. 


They call her name.
Susy breathes. She sees herself before she leaves the house, closing, switching off, holding keys. Susy is worried that she has left the gas on, or the taps, a door unlocked, a window open.

She looks around. She wonders if they are watching her. She is also not sure exactly what this place is. Susy is not sure what they want from her. Although they did not ask her to bring anything. She feels like there is something she's forgotten. Susy sits in the waiting room. 


In the waiting room,
Susy sits. There is something

she's forgotten, Susy feels.
Bring anything,  although they

did not ask her. Not sure  
what they want

from her. Susy is this
place? She is also not.

Sure. Exactly. What if
they are watching her, she wonders.

Around she looks, left.
The gas on, or the taps, a door

unlocked, a window open? Susy
is worried herself. Before she leaves

the house closing, switching
off, holding the keys. She sees

that she has her name.
Susy breathes they.

Call.

"Geology": A Poem by Tasha Beauchesne

Tasha Beauchesne is from the United States. She is entering the final year of university and is working towards a career in the publishing industry. She says of the poem "Geology" below that "it was the product of a deceptively simple prompt in a creative writing class: write about childhood. Memories of growing up with my childhood best friend in Massachusetts formed the basis for this poem."

Geology

The rock in your front yard was a boulder, 
an asteroid,
a remnant from when dinosaurs 
(or maybe aliens)
ruled the world.

Our heads bumping the sky,
we would survey the pavement,
swinging our bruised summer-sunned legs,
imagining we sat at the edge of the earth.

The evening August sun winked behind the mountains,
sparkling on the hood of your dad’s parked car,
lighting the scuffed wheels of our Razor scooters
lying haphazardly in the grass. 

We waited for the explorers and scientists
with flimsy brushes and microscopes 
to show up and declare our rock a wonder. 

With the six o’clock news glowing purple in your living room,
your mom called us back inside.

Two Poems by Scott Freer

Scott Freer lives in Leicester, is an English Literature lecturer and is editor of The Journal for the T.S. Eliot Society (UK). Turning the Wild West of an allotment into a friable tilth is meant to improve your worldview and vocabulary. The title of the poem ‘Omniscient Certainty’ (below) is borrowed from Jonathan Taylor's book Science and Omniscience in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007), with particular reference to Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Enlightenment quest for total knowledge.  

Omniscient Certainty

Look towards the edge 
of the allotment
and find a bucket 
to carry the water
to feed a little life into the dried tubers

A tiny hole at the rusting base 
creates a trickling effect
and by the time you cross the earth
from the sunken stream
a continuous trace will lead you back

In the summer the potatoes multiply
And the guttering arches on the shed

Life seems so certain here
Surveying this cherished patch 



Chickenshit

She goes to the allotment
Carrying the chickenshit
To fertilize the potatopatch

I, on the other hand,
Return to our bed
And my morning
Poetic arising

But where’s my chickenshit?
Only a muddy-ascending-noise
And nothing
Material
Rises
Except the cat of course
From out of a duvet-patch

Now, I could tell you about
Our Buddhist neighbours
Whose earth onto-theology is
Plant deep 
Nurture
And wait for 
The mysterious white chickens

Chickenshit, I say,
Without the magical compound
Nothing material (potato/poem)
Rises 

Cosmological Poems for NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory

(Image: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Alberta/B.Tetarenko et al; Optical: NASA/STScI; Radio: NSF/AUI/NRAO/Curtin Univ./J. Miller-Jones)

As part of the second year undergraduate Creative Writing module, "Using Stories," students explore some of the overlaps between science and writing. This year, Dr. Ian Whittaker from the Department of Physics and Astronomy gave an amazing guest lecture on various remarkable astronomical phenomena; and students were encouraged to write poems inspired by cosmological research, and, in particular, the ground-breaking work of NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory in Harvard. We subsequently ran a poetry competition in conjunction with Chandra, for which students were invited to submit poems inspired (directly or indirectly) by one of Chandra's news stories.

The winning poem has now been chosen. The winner of the competition is Fraser McIntosh, with his poem "VLA J2130 + 12." You can read the winning entry published on NASA Chandra's famous website here. 

There were also two runners-up, by Alicia Saccoh and Olivia Titherington, which are featured below. 


Musicality: 10


When I turn my insides out for you, I let them hit the boards.
Every stage I’ve ever taken, ever floor I’ve fallen on,
They all hold my DNA within the graining of their wood.
It soaks me up. I get so thirsty, but it fades when I spill blood,
The purest form, you see, of beauty

Is the dying, desperate swan, her joints near-breaking – 
Oh, they must be!
How else could her body do – ? But no,
She lives
She breathes
She moves
And weeps 
And dances hard and long,
Hard and long.
All through the day,
And night,
No sleep! Hearts to be won!
And how could I waste time to eat 
When the extension of my upheld wrist 

Throughout the grand jeté,
Is not yet quite – just – so?
Tell me: how could I? I could not, 
And so I wake up, 
Get up; dark out, lights on
Stretch out, warm up
Oh, and where's the day gone? 
It's almost time for bed again
My blood is on the floor again
I've never been more beautiful. I am sure to be fed. 
The moment comes, 
The lights illuminate me 
And your cries immortalise me
And the moment forces me to break myself again,
And the music grabs and tears at me 
And pulls me by my hair 
And still the promise of your love
Is rising, forcing my feet up, 
Up, up!

Ankles well over toes and turned right out and held so high 
And – there.
That is how it happens. 
That is how a tired thing flies. 


By Alicia Saccoh, inspired by Chandra's press release ‘Astronomers Discover Powerful Cosmic Double Whammy,’ January 5 2017. 

 

The Sun and Her Children


She is the oldest woman of the sky,
The sun lit the earth from above and high.
Bright and burning with her orange-red glow,
Her presence was loved by creatures below.
And when she had burned and the day was done,
The light was hidden, the darkness had come.
She knew it was the time to take cover, 
As the Moon would soon rise and take over.
His grey light was no match for her fire,
But still he did always desire
To keep the night and to take back the day, 
And keep out the sun much to her dismay.
And when day was over she’d weep all night, 
Sadness that came with darkness dimmed her light.
The late hours and night were a loss she’d mourn,
Until she did have her spot back at dawn.
And when the light mellowed and the dusk came,
Her joy was gone, she not did feel the same.
This sky, the moon and she would always share,
She knew that it could never be for her.

On time went and centuries passed by,
Like different visitors in the sky.
They greeted the sun and they left their mark,
She knew they would not be there after dark.
And now only few of her friends remain,
The Thunder and the lightning and the rain.
Despite her sorrow the sun still burned bright,
But longed for company in the dark night.
She wished for something she could call her own,
Something she could love and have at her home.
With this wish the silver stars were now born,
They were with her at dusk and stayed at dawn.
The sun was radiant and with joy she beamed,
She was not alone at night when she dreamed.
Stars filled the sky with glittery glow,
They sawed and glistened, and put on a show.
Their presence dazzled the creatures of Earth,
The sky was brighter now than the Sun’s birth.

In the middle of the glowing Sun’s joy,
The silver Moon still remained sly and coy.
He had become ugly, jealous, angry,
He stayed in shadows of the family.
He had had enough of the stars and her,
He planned to take the stars, he did not care.
And when the night came again the sun slept,
And with a vision the sleepy moon crept.
To commit the greatest heist ever done,
And he took out the bright stars one by one.
They were iridescent but not as much,
The result of his cold and icy touch.
The stars fought to stay with their mother,
They pleaded to stay with one another.
He had no mercy, he stole them away,
They never again saw the sun or the day.

The sun awoke from her restful night’s sleep,
She found out what happened and she wept.
Although she still burned and glowed forever,
She did not rise at dawn for whatever.
Two full moons had appeared and then gone,
And still the sad sun had not rose or shone.
The earth was festooned in sheets of white cold,
The result of the darkness staying bold.
The creatures of earth longed for her yellow heat,
And yet the solemn sun still retreated.
They wished on the stars that stayed in the dark,
They remained with their silhouette stark.
These stars mourned for these creatures below,
So with their power they burned bright and glowed.
Sun saw their light in sadness and despair,
Finally she had power to repair
The moon’s touch and she rose in the dark sky,
The ice melted and the creatures sighed.
The sun saw how much she was longed for,
And vowed to rise each day forever more.

The sun rises in the early hours,
Until the dusk comes and the moon towers.
Earth is not ever-bright as it had been,
The sun still shone but was not always seen.
She remains modest in some cold seasons,
Her sleep and rest does not need a reason.
But the Earth still spins and life does go on,
For they know she will not always be gone.
Some months she provides warmth everywhere,
Some months Earth is cold and sunlight is rare.
Some months she is discreet behind the clouds,
Some months they await her and say aloud:
“She’s there, it’s warmer, and flowers will bloom!”
As she guides them from the cold weather’s gloom
This season is spring starting the year,
No one complains because summer’s near.
The sun is content, with Earth as her friend
But she won’t forget, her heart will not mend.
She still wishes the stars were there by her side,
Burning bright by her, with her as their guide.
The stars remember the bright fire always,
The one who stands alone throughout the days.
The stars still follow the moon in the night,
But they glow for her with eternal light.


By Olivia Titherington, inspired by Chandra's press release ‘Astronomers Gain New Insight into Magnetic Field of Sun and its Kin,’ July 27 2016.