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first prize, The Mirehouse Poetry Competition,
2009
The brightest star
Henrietta Swan
Leavitt, 1868 – 1921
Is
it because she can hear nothing that she strains her eyes
to
see the farthest stars? Her ears blur sound
but
her eyes look through the thirteen lenses
layered
inside this telescope she’s invented;
her
eyes see all the known stars of the universe
and
she’s the one who starts recording them.
Her
mind – the brightest one in Harvard, so they say –
works
out a way of knowing how far away
a
star is from the earth: by calculating brightness,
she
can measure distance. Because of this,
they
start to map out space: to calibrate
how
big the Milky Way is, how old the universe.
She
finds new stars – novae that suddenly
shine
bright, then fade away. Cancer eclipses her.
By
the time they think of her for the Nobel, she’s dead.
Instead
they name a crater on the moon for her.
The
maps of galaxies go on and on expanding.
She’s
watching from a soundless place, light years ahead.
Elizabeth Burns
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last
update:
e-mail
Elizabeth
Elizabeth
Burns website
poetry favourites:
Scottish Poetry Library
Flax
Books
and in
the
shop
...
collections -
"The
Lantern Bearers",
Shoestring Press;
"Ophelia",
Polygon;
"The
Gift of Light",
diehard
pamphlets
-
"The Shortest Days",
"The Time of Gold",
"The Alteration"
and
"The
Blue Flower...",
Galdragon Press
anthologies:
"The
book of Hopes and Dreams", bluechrome;
"Images
of Women",
Second Light /
Arrowhead Press
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