31 December 2017

Twitter: @burns_nancy

• This ends three weeks of ‘reading anything I like’.
• After an intense #AusReadingMonth  in November
• ….I needed to take a break.
• I slapped on my apron and have been cooking one great dish after another!
• Now I must get back into my reading chair.
• Today I will choose some challenges for 2018 and my reading direction.
• There are a lot of choices to make today!
• Now this last poem by Australian Bronwyn Lovell was the perfect ending.
• I managed to memorize Emotional Astronomer.
• Wishing all readers, visitors and bloggers  a very Happy New year 2018 !

Update: 31.12.2017

Read poem:  Emotional Astronomer (Browyn Lovell, Australian)…but at 0300 AM this morning.  I awoke and could not fall asleep and managed to memorize the poem. Then I slept for another 5 hours. My brain absorbed Lovell’s words like a sponge. I discovered the FORM made memorization easy! Each  phrase starts with a verb  3rd person present….except for the last line.

Emotional Astronomer

• cares for telescopes like mechanical pets
• camps out with cameras and an aching neck
• tints torchlight, dims his van brothel-red
• waits for the Earth to move, the moon to set
• props a director’s chair for the fade to black
• can’t factor his children’s resentment
• accepts the conditions, won’t ask the sky why
• will not love a nebula less the tenth time
• gets teary at a clear viewing of Alpha Centauri
• feels things to which his wife won’t relate
• needs no chart to plot the now fragile arc
• of a retired accountant’s amateur star—
• knows meteors will rain down consolation:
• Jupiter a river pebble, Saturn a silky stone

Last line:

1. I wanted to learn the meaning of this line
2. …why did it differ from the rest of the poem?
3. I started to look into meteor showers
4. …and found that the gravitational pulls of
5. Saturn and Jupiter might combine to
6. ….cause spectacular meteor showers.
7. Meteors are fragments of ice and rock.
8. Now I see how Lovell used this information
9. to give the poem a surprising sense of closure
10. that satisfied this reader….after some investigation!