One of my earliest memories in life was of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. The year was 1986, and my mom was dropping me off at daycare in Lisbon, North Dakota, before going to her job as a receptionist at the town chiropractor’s office. I don’t remember if it was the day of the accident, or perhaps in the following days and weeks that our country was focused on the tragedy, but I remember standing in the daycare—someone’s house—while this image of a snake-like white cloud kept playing over and over on the tiny TV on the kitchen countertop.
I remember the adults were very quiet, and kept hushing the other kids and me, but I couldn’t really understand why.
Decades later, when I was taking a poetry class as part of my post-baccalaureate creative writing program, one of our assignments was to write three sonnets: that classic, 14-lined form, of which Shakespeare wrote 160! Mostly centered on themes of love, the Shakespearean (English) sonnet often takes on the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, however for no particular reason, I chose to use the form of the Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet: ABBA ABBA CDE CDE.
Though it’s true that many sonnets are about love, I’m not great at writing love poems. However, since I had recently watched an excellent documentary on the Challenger, I decided to set that tragedy as the subject.
Uh-oh^ NASA’s porky soldier stands shrouded in mist: a star-spangled studhorse on Florida’s shore. Guzzling the dreck of this cold, knackered war, the graveyard shift pauses to praise Reagan’s fist. Astronauts have been kissed, the countdown clock ticks, jokes orbit the flight deck—a breezy rapport. Then, like panthers in heat, the rockets uproar, through a blunt-force thrust and a groin-stirring lift. . . . Nine miles up above, bursts a quiet kaboom: a serpentine ribbon of smoke and steam which uncoils slowly towards panic below. A TV crew captures the helical plume, like a melting ribbon of buttercream, smearing the sky to bleak Atlantic foam. ————————————————— ^Final words transmitted by astronaut Mike Scott to ground control from Space Shuttle Challenger (1/28/86)
April is National Poetry Month! I aim to post a poem each weekday in celebration of the form. Some old, some new, some published, some never-before-seen.