Tuesday Poem: “Nanosphere” by Harvey Molloy
Nanosphere
The Enemy of the World
watery eyed, unkempt,
finally captured after months in a hole.
A lab coat prods his back dentures
with a disposable spatula. How
slow and compliant the prisoner moves
like a rest home inmate.
In this cosmos his capture
shall be eclipsed by news
of the accidental discovery of the end of time
as weightless above this earth
from the station console
Irina checks the Doppler shifts
from the Sombrero, Andromeda, closer Tau Ceti.
Aware of the pressure of the moment
she pauses to gaze at the withered fingers
of a passing river delta
then tells Control her final confirmation:
the expansion is over and the big crunch has begun
the slow seven billion year retrenchment
from universe to nanosphere.
Her news crosses the twittering
of the only known radio intelligence:
0800 chatline numbers
psychic advice lines
impending Serbian elections
weather updates
body counts
Chinese operas
Marilyn’s slow turn in a hall of mirrors
Chico and the Man.
The day’s journeying calls roll out
within the bounded horizon of vast contracting dot.
There is only so much time and time is running back.
The children watch television in the dark.
(c) Harvey Molloy
Published in Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand, Ed. Tim Jones & Mark Pirie, Interactive Press, Australia, 2009
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About Harvey Molloy:
Harvey’s poetry and short fiction have appeared in Albatross, Blackmail Press, Brief, Bravado, Jaam, Lancashire Life, The Lumière Reader, NZ Listener, Poetry New Zealand, Southern Ocean Review and Takahe. He is a previous winner of the New Zealand International Poetry Competition for his poem “Diwali “and his first book of poems, Moonshot, was published by Steele Roberts in 2008. He has also published non-fiction work on Asperger Syndrome, and is the co-author, with Latika Vasil, of the book Asperger Syndrome, Adolescence, and Identity: Looking Beyond the Label. He is now working on his second book of poems. Harvey is a secondary school teacher in Wellington, New Zealand. You may also visit Harvey on his website, here.
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About Nanosphere:
I have previously featured another Voyagers anthology poem as my Tuesday Poem selection (Tim Jones’ The First Artist on Mars)—but Voyagers contains many outstanding poems. In particular, I very much like the way Harvey Molloy’s Nanopshere makes the speculative shift from a real world event to the cosmic stage in a way that juxtaposes an array of “relativities”. It seemed both fitting—given that I am currently hosting a series of guest posts by Australian and NZ Fantasy-Science Fiction authors—and timely to feature another science fiction poem from an anthology of New Zealand poems brought out by an Australian publisher.
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It’s lovely to see another poem from “Voyagers” (and from Harvey’s collection “Moonshot”) featured as a Tuesday Poem. Thanks for posting it, Helen!
Tim—thank you for mentioning Moonshot, which I should cited! (Apologies, Harvey.)
As I said in my note, I really love the speculative element in the poem, which juxtaposes the enormity of the universe and theories such as the “Big Bang” with the “littleness” we cling to in our lives. Regardless of whether or not we are in the gutter (probably not strictly necessary [grins]) we should still be looking at the stars, imho!