To Every Craft, Its Proper Mystery

by Jane Hirshfield

On the fifth day the scientists who studied the rivers were forbidden to speak or to study the rivers.

The scientists who studied the air were told not to speak of the air, and the ones who worked for the farmers were silenced, and the ones who worked for the bees.

Someone, from deep in the Badlands, began posting facts.

The facts were told not to speak and were taken away. The facts, surprised to be taken, were silent.

Now it was only the rivers that spoke of the rivers, and only the wind that spoke of its bees,

while the unpausing factual buds of the fruit trees continued to move toward their fruit.

The silence spoke loudly of silence, and the rivers kept speaking, of rivers, of boulders and air.

Bound to gravity, earless and tongueless, the untested rivers kept speaking.

Bus drivers, shelf stockers, code writers, machinists, accountants, lab techs, cellists kept speaking.

Olga Kvasha (Ukrainian, born 1976) Quietest Evening, 2013

Oil on canvas

75 x 95 cm

Anniversary of APOLLO 11 MOON LANDING

On July 20, 1969, 109 hours and 42 minutes after launch, Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin entered the lunar lander ‘Eagle’, made a final check, and the Eagle undocked from the lunar orbiter ‘Columbia’, where the third member of the crew Michael Collins, stayed in orbit around the moon. Partially manually piloted by Armstrong, the Eagle landed 0 degrees, 41 minutes, 15 seconds north moon latitude and 23 degrees, 26 minutes east moon longitude. Armstrong stepped out, and Aldrin followed 20 minutes later: human beings stepped on the moon for the first time. The two men spent 21 hours and 26 minutes on its surface. One of the astounding aspects of the mission was the seeming simplicity of the technology used to get man to the moon. According to Oliver Gassmann, professor of Technology Management, the mobile phone in your pocket has one million times more memory than the Apollo 11’s computer. Same about the procesor: the latest phones typically have more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.

Sleeping Muse