Tag: meteors

star feature

It’s that time of year again, when the Earth passes through the tail of a comet and our skies light up with shooting stars. (They aren’t stars in the photo, of course; I don’t think they’re even moon daisies: but daytime weeds are a lot easier to photograph than the sky at night.)

In the village in Spain, you only had to step outside onto the lawn and look up, and there was the Milky Way speckle-splashed across the sky as if someone had flicked a paintbrush from one side of the valley to the other.
Continue reading “star feature”

the sun and the stars

It seems wrong not to post to the blog with a poem for the Perseid meteor shower. Unfortunately, I don’t have any shooting-stars poems that haven’t been posted previously. Instead, the best I’ve come up with is a picture of this glorious miniature sun which is currently flowering in my back garden:

sunflower
Those who want the poetry will find some if they click the link above. And I’ll go out and star-gaze later on and see if I can have something new written in time for next year.

star’ku

Gredos twilight
 
 
 

Watching shooting stars,
your arm around my shoulders

No need for wishes

 
 
 
 
 
For those who are looking for more perseids, I posted a few other pieces on the subject of shooting stars this time last year.

“just one more”

It’s 4 a.m. and you stand on the lawn,
knees slightly bent, head back, facing
infinity, scanning for meteors. Come on;
it’s time for bed, I Zebedee, but you beg,
Just one more. And so I watch you
watching for falling stars, diamond scatter
from the Milky Way, and think of the tip-tilt,
star-gazey hare in the moon. There! look!
You point skywards, but the pointing finger
roots me firmly to the earth. Come on,
I say, but you are galaxies away, determined
to wait for Just one more.

 
It’s that time of year again: time for the Perseids, which I saw for the first time lying in Battersea Park two day’s after I had my wisdom teeth out. Although I was with a couple of radio hams who assured me they were ‘meteor scatter’, even some thirty years later I still wish when I see a shooting star.