The debris, he added, will almost certainly intersect with the orbit of the International Space Station.Īnd, as it turns out, the ISS crew had already been told to expect eight minutes-worth of “debris field transit,” to get out of the space station and into their little lifeboat modules, every 93 minutes. An American satellite watcher who’s also an astronomer adds that Kosmos 1408 was, and all its pieces might be, in a 465 x 490 km orbit. The German watcher says 14 bits, debris objects, have been tracked and though “my unofficial source has been pretty reliable on topics like this in the past,” the whole event is still unconfirmed. ![]() I wanted to say “blew it out of the sky” but the satellite was of course in orbit so the exploded bits don’t fall down, they stay in the sky, still orbiting. Ī German satellite watcher says Russia hit one of its own old spy satellites, Kosmos 1408, with a missile and blew it to bits. I mean, unlike Paramecia, Homo doesn’t learn just wipe ’em out and start over. And hasn’t human incontinence already created the Anthropocene clusterfuck on earth, do we really need to re-create it in space? Some days I understand what God had in mind with the Flood. And astronomers already have to look between bright lines of garbage to find stars. And those satellites can reproduce out there because every time one of them gets blown up, on purpose or not, the explosion creates a zillion (someone knows the number, I don’t) more things in space. I mean, Elon keeps putting his Starlinks all over space, plus OneWeb and Planet and Jilin-1 keep putting all their satellite constellations all over space, plus the National Reconnaissance Office just announced the number of its spy satellites is going to quadruple, I mean, the graph line of the number of satellites beginning in 2022 was heading straight north, hundreds of thousands of satellites. I first wrote this November 29, 2021, but I could have written the same take-home many times since and I could write it now. A version of this poem originally appeared in Passionfruit. Still, the birds of this poem have their own private, gleaming little niche in my memory, vivid and tender as a bruise. I’ve studied an audio glossary of jay calls and songs in the vain hopes of learning to understand at least a little of their language. I’ve spent endless hours reading about them, watching them, talking to them, and listening. In the intervening years I’ve gotten to know blue jays much better as a species and as individuals. I can still remember that moment: the early-morning air, the flash of blue. ![]() Many of my poems are not autobiographical, but this one is. ![]() (This post first appeared in March of 2022). There are many, many more blue jay poems in my future. My blue jay friends are back, tap-dancing on my balcony to get my attention, peering accusingly through the living room windows until I get up to fetch the peanut dish.
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