Nordette N. Adams

Reports from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
 
Two black holes

colliding – the LIGO chirp –

echo of celestial bodies bump-

ing a billion years ago.      Brief spark.

“More energy than all the stars conjoined.”

The ripple turned

into the rising C of greater masses

merging.

The chirp’s interpolated so

the universe speaks a swoosh of odd sucks

and swallows when spacetime curves under gravitational flow.

Over us, these waves wash, unseen.  We are senseless.

We feel nothing

while the universe works hard, works,

drawing in its blown-up bits.

Does it model love?

When the wormhole finally forms, we can slip

arms through ether like Mr. Spock, we are told,

and touch moments of mistakes made.

Will we seek the second we fell off-track

and squish between our fingers the white,

brown, yellow, black fences men constructed?

“The universe has rhythm. Listen.”

We listen and we listen.

We are small,

must collect our blown-up bits,

seek the universal beat till we sway

as one great body.

When we sway as one great body,

we will swoosh.
 
 
 
Nordette N. Adams grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. By the time of this publication, she will have received an MFA in poetry from the University of New Orleans. Her poetry has appeared in QUAINT Magazine, Poetry Life & Times, and Adagio Verse Quarterly. Educators have included her work in elementary through college level curricula, and students as well as civic leaders have recited her work for special events. Nordette is a winner of the Sandhills Award for literary short fiction, and more recently her non-fiction writing on sexist language in the Oxford Dictionary of English has been acknowledged in multiple publications around the world. Her411.com