Sunday, December 27, 2020

"Third Swing" -- Around Venus -- Completed By Parker Probe, As Luminous Dawn Arrived, This Morning...


In the gray half light of dawn, this morning local US time, ESA and NASA’s Parker Solar Orbiter completed its third Venus flyby. The spacecraft uses the planet’s gravity to swing closer to the Sun and tilt its orbit for the first-ever view of the Sun’s poles:



Onward. . . grinning -- ever grinning.

नमस्ते

'Tis a good excuse, also, to drink in poetry (drowning, perhaps momentarily at least, beneath some haunting waters) -- drawn under, I suppose, by Mr. Williams' sublime, and surprising, prose:

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings wax



a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

Unsignificantly
off the coast
there was



of the year was
awake tingling
near

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning



the edge of the sea
concerned only
with itself



-- William Carlos Williams
(1883 to 1963)

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