Blue Marble Earth

Feb 13 2015

                                                                                     

We should have been humbled
by that illuminated planet
in the vastness of space.

Mother earth,
a small blue marble
against the black.

But it's been decades
since we were far enough away
to see the earth whole.
So much so
you'd think we were alone
in the universe,
all those satellites

beaming TV, weather, GPS,

so close

the shadow of earth

looms over them,

the massive planet

wheeling just beneath.
Like nosing up to the screen
hoping to see more clearly,

but the brightness blinds

pixels dissolve

into incoherence.

We went to the moon
took one look back
and then returned.
Home, to life as before,
wanting more
and fighting our wars
and mining the planet,

'til only scorched earth

will be left to posterity.
To forgetting how long it's been
since the entire screen

wasn't filled with us.
So that half a century on

we haven't gotten as far

as the moon-shot;

white-men with slide rules,

America

astride the world.

One picture, one sharp revelation
could have changed us for good.
But we stayed too close,
straining our eyes
as if mesmerized
by the candy colours

and flickering light.

Satellites
in low earth orbit
criss-crossing the sky,
barely grazing the air
that keeps us alive.
The atmosphere, egg-shell thin
in which all of us swim,
billions of self-important souls
breathing in

each other.

More rant than poem, but something I have to indulge once in awhile.

This one came after reading this, an article about a new satellite launch, in The Atlantic On-Line.


... when then vice president Al Gore bolted out of bed with a vision of providing ‘a clearer view of our world.’” Gore was inspired by imagery from the Apollo missions, and, it seems specifically, The Blue Marble, the first photo of the entire sunlit Earth at once.

Gore loved The Blue Marble. He hung a picture of it in his office. But then, as today, getting new versions of the Blue Marble—pictures of what the entire sunlit planet looked like today—wasn’t easy. We don’t have astronauts going back and forth to the moon anymore.

Instead, we make Photoshopped versions. Modern-day Blue Marble-like photos have to be stitched together from composite images. (The default iPhone background is one of these composites.) True whole-Earth photographs are rare.


Most of us can immediately picture that famous "Blue Marble Earth". But we forget that it dates from Apollo: as far back as the 60s, when they navigated by slide rule and took pictures on actual film. And we forget how briefly we sojourned even that limited distance from earth: only long enough to see how small we were, give pause, and then return to business as usual. The power of the picture remains. If anything deserves that terribly over-used designation "iconic", it does. But now, our view has gone back in time, from before blue marble earth: too granular and close up to appreciate where we live. We've become distracted. We've moved closer to the screen -- as the central metaphor of the poem suggests -- only to realize that this makes things less clear, not more.

We flatter ourselves that we are space-farers, exploring far from earth. But we're really just stuck in low earth orbit, barely grazing the atmosphere. And mostly looking in on ourselves.

You can read this poem several ways. There are allusions to environmentalism and interdependence, to humility and gratitude, to solipsism and self-importance. To me, it's an environmental poem, its entire message contained in the smallness and fragility of blue marble earth.

I think the key line is to see the earth whole. I really wanted whole to jump out, and toyed with giving the word its own line: even more than the privileged place at the end of a line it already possesses (what I call "end emphasis", an expression I think I heard somewhere back in the mists of time, too long ago to remember or attribute).But that seemed to lack subtlety, as well as artfulness: I think an attentive reader would feel offended at being so spoon-fed. Home works in a similar way, in the 3rd stanza. The word seems superfluous. But it's not only an emotional potent word, it reminds us that there is only one place in the universe where we can survive (until we know better), and that sensible creatures do not despoil where they live.

The original version had, in the penultimate stanza, could have changed us indelibly. I tried pretty much everything to get this right: irrevocably, permanently, irreversibly, diametrically, utterly ... . So I was thrilled when the delightful double entendre of the oh-so-simple for good struck me.

The final stanza reinforces this basic theme of earth's fragility; and, by implication ours. Especially the "egg-shell thin atmosphere", followed by the allusion to both our dependence and interdependence: swimming in its soup; the recycled air on which every living thing depends.

After finishing this, I was almost certain I'd written it before. Because I often return to the same things, recycle the same tropes and images, plagiarize some favourite phrases I've already used; so this isn't unusual. And I'm always curious to see what's changed in my approach: am I getting better, worse, holding my own? So I typed some key words into the search function to see what came up. Apparently, I hadn't written this poem before. But some parts of it have appeared before. You might enjoy checking out Geography Lessons, Low Earth Orbit, and Signals From Space. I also came across Too Small to Notice, which has nothing to do with this, but I found I quite like (still!) (You have to understand that once I've posted a poem and moved on, I pretty much forget all the "old" ones. So even after several months, it's as if I'm reading them for the first time. And it's great to have that distance:  I actually get to experience them as a new reader would; to hear them without knowing what's coming next, without having "rehearsed" the reading.)