Abstract
Hanabi translates as “fireworks”, but the Japanese expression is formed by joining the kanjis “hana”, one of whose meanings is “flower”, and “bi”, “fire”. That’s literally “fire flower”.
Like bonfires in the night/one every second/the last one performing its burning dance in the galaxy/triggered Johannes Kepler’s extasis/forever the geometer of mysticism/one more explosion might have been the end/of the old planet.
And yet/this particular chant/of sound waves and gamma rays/this blinding and overwhelming way of dying/(dense swan of carbon, silica and oxygen)/bequeathed to the beginning of time/a nutritous trace.
Today the scientists/with the joy of ancient poets/they proclaim/in the days of the totem and the sphere:/we’re the children/of a star
Natalia Carbajosa
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
For curious readers: http://www.madrimasd.org/cienciaysociedad/mediateca/default.asp?videoID=960.
- 3.
- 4.
Whose life was put to an abrupt end by the guillotine of the French Revolution.
- 5.
Because of an impossible love with a man who would become the eminent mathematician Kazimierz Zorawski. Marie worked as a householder at the Zorawskis, cousins of her father, and the young man’s familiy opposed the engagement with a poor relative.
- 6.
But perhaps Stephen Mitchell, Rainer Marie Rilke’s great translator, was right when stating that after God’s visit a happy ending is unnecessary.
- 7.
The root radio obviously refers to the element discovered by the Curies.
- 8.
Here we’re ignoring the fact that 238U decays into other radioactive elements, some of them with quite short half lives, each of the contributing to the total activity of the sample.
- 9.
Or almost of the present: for example http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/science/sciencenews/3322276/Star-Trek-style-ion-engine-tofuel-Mercury-craft.html.
References
Robert, R. (1974). Marie Curie, New American Library.
Smil, V. (2006). Transforming the twentieth century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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© 2012 Juan José Gómez Cadenas
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Gómez Cadenas, J.J. (2012). The Bequest of a Supernova. In: The Nuclear Environmentalist. Springer, Milano. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-88-470-2478-6_8
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