These are the 2023 winners

First Place:
“Message in a Bottle”
by

Steven Desch

The Milky Way,
a spiral arm:
collapsing gas,
it's getting warm...

Here stars are born,
they age and burst.
They're not the last,
and not the first.

Within this arm,
for gigayears,
the stars will form;
some disappear,

but leave a trace
for stars to come,
from oxygen
to curium

and isotopes
thrown in the gas,
enriching it
as eons pass.

Eight billion years
of to-and-fro.
About five billion
years ago.

a yellow star
formed from this foam,
with planets, even
one called Home.

And in the rocks
around this Sun,
a distant tale
of stars now done,

of isotopes
that have decayed,
and atoms that
the stars once made

quickly scribbled,
for us to reach,
in rocks on a
galactic beach,

in a bottle,
washed up on shore:
a note from stars
that are no more.

Second Place: Susan McClellan
““Meteor Haiku Number 1” ”
by

Susan McClellan

shooting star up high
meteor streaks through the sky
fleeting beauty, bye.

Third Place:
“““360”” ”
by

Jonathan Riggs

“It’s just a rock,” we sneer 
and stare into our phone
but if you really think about it
so’s the earth our home

 

and everything on which we stand
and live our insect lives
we plumb for meaning in our screens
and to what’s beyond are blind

 

that “just a rock” behind the glass
danced through space and spun
to burn and freeze and fly and fall
a life before the sun

 

it hit the ground and now stares back
wise-quiet ponders through
“it’s just a rock,” it hears but knows
“I’ve seen much more than you.”

Fourth Place:
“One Night I Just Happened to See”
by

Bob Turvey

One night I just happened to see 
In the sky a flash; what could it be? 
I just couldn’t decide- 
Meteorite or bolide? 
And then the damn thing hit my knee. 

These are the 2022 winners

Winner: Winchcombe

James Salmon

Why so strange?
What hath been wrought?
Why the range?
Who would have thought?
When did your tiny chondrules have their birth?
Where in the Sun’s disk were you made?
What is the priceless knowledge worth?
Was your condensation long delayed?
When did your isotopes slowly alter?
Can we guess the origin of your water?
So let’s see the ratio of Deuterium,
And we had better check on the Chromium.
Was Jupiter the barrier celestial,
That makes our Earth terrestrial?

We all love our Pallasite peridot
And our Widdmanstatten pattern
But all this matters not a jot.
For as Keats wrote an ode to a Grecian urn:
We grasp for knowledge in mad pursuit
Will silent be, for truth is beauty,
And seek unheard melodies at the root
Of science unseen; our life’s duty.

Second Place: ASTEROID, AZZA, AZRAEL

Steve Desch

Catastrophe caught on camera, quick-captured in place:
A charcoal-and-metal mountain, suspended in space.
Foot higher than air, its head dipped in the seas,
Stop-motioned, it straddles two realities.

Eons before, planetesimal in stately revolution
Eons to come, instigator of great-leap evolution

Just hours ago, mock Mercury in the empyrean.
Just hours from now, tektite rain of death and iridium.

One second ago, it reached Earth without sound
One second from now, it will burst below ground

This moment is the division between,
Cleaving Cretaceous and Paleogene

In that single spring night in the Yucatan
Is one era’s demise, as our own began.
In that frozen moment, too quick to be seen,
Past and future ruptured, a knife edge between
Ethereal and inearthed,
Heavenly and upheaval,
Asteroid, and all-destroyed

O’er Chicxulub, Azza, the falling angel
Is hanging between the heavens, and hell

Third Place: The Wonder of Space

Cynthia Callard

Blazing through the heavens high
A streak of bright molten light
Lighting up the darkened sky
A great shower of pure delight

From heaven’s outer reaches
In fury it streaked away
Through raging, freezing tempests
Forging its own right of way

Frozen, ice and heavy rock
Liquid metal flying fast
Whizzing through the atmosphere
At this speed it could not last

A flash, a mighty impact
A crater gouged deep in rock
This mighty force from heaven
Landed on earth with a shock

The “oo”-ing and the “ah”-ing
From so many miles around
The chipping and the sawing
The hammering too, abound

To capture a piece of it
A fragment from its dead core
A magical memento
A minute piece of space ore

But all efforts come to naught
Its hardness no man can harm
From its space hardened surface
It yields not a lucky charm

The meteorites space debris,
Pebbles of dimpled bedrock,
Lie scattered from its crater
Just mystical burnt, black rock

Fourth Place: ASTEREA’S TEARS

Juliet Rothman

This poem is partly drawn from the legend of the goddess Asterea, one of the Olympian deities,
goddess of the stars, after whom, the legend tells, asteroids were named.

The Universe embraces all in infinite darkness,
While in her graceful Temple of silver,
High on Olympus Mount, The goddess Asterea,
Queen and ruler of the stars in all the Heavens,
Rests quietly, her face turned upward,
Toward the bright and shining sparkles.

And the stars, gratefully receiving her love,
Shine and twinkle happily, ever brighter.
She names them – Sirius, Rigel, and Vega
Betelgeuse, Antares, Altair, and Canopus,
Shapes them into
figures dancing through night.

One evening, Asterea bids them all goodnight,
And closes her eyes into a deep, deep sleep.
And in her sleep in a dream she awakens.
And all is dark. No friendly stars winking at her.
No friendly, familiar shapes shine into her eyes

Where are the stars? Have they all gone away?
She begins to weep, tears fall from her eyes,
And each floats off alone, into the darkness.
Asterea watches as her tears slide away,
Away from Mount Olympus, into the night.

And from her dream, she slowly opens her eyes,
And once again sees her stars brightly shining.
Sees all the figures she has given named,
Sees her world, returns to her queenship,
Watches and guides her stars in the heavens.

But, what has happened to all of her tears?
To the tears so desperately shed, when all was dark?
She sees them floating far from her, caught in swirls
Through the dark sky, moving as though directed,
All on their own, wandering, lost in the vastness.

Asterea’s tears float on through the years,
Moving faster or slower, nearer the stars,
Or farther, crashing into heavenly bodies,
Or just floating by. Asterea’s tears remain,
As she watches them, from her Temple
afar.
Asterea’s tears. Our asteroids.

These are the 2021 winners

Winner: ”Return to Sender”

Steve Desch

We tend to say Earth’s building blocks
were plain chondritic asteroid rocks
and tell a story nice and neat:
accretion was a one-way street.
But might collisions also place
some Earthy rocks back into space?

Asteroid impacts lack finesse.
Colliding bodies make a mess.
How many garnets, jades and granites
once were blasted off of planets?
Could it be the Belt was pelted
with some rocks that once were melted?

The “A” type asteroids we have seen
are mostly made of olivine,
forged within the depths of Mars,
but then ejected to the stars
when a rock-Mars confrontation
formed the Borealis Basin.

Though it might seem somewhat strange,
the Belt and planets did exchange
more than a planetesimal's worth
of rocks formed at the very birth
of bodies just like Mars and Earth...
If proto-Earth's crust was destroyed,
why not terrestrial asteroids?!

Second Place: A Man Waits for a Meteorite

Kyle Webster

On an island in an uncharted sea
the grainy shores are slowly washed away
by waves of a forgotten world
which bring messages of ill-tiding.

There is no way to reach this land
except for falling from the heavens
no boat nor horse nor caravan
could journey to the sandy beaches.

Yet on this island there is a statue
of a long forgotten man
whose name escapes the grasps of time
like the fleeting whisper of the wind.

The marble base is sturdy and strong
his chiseled body stands in the breeze
there are no visitors he must endure
yet no movements he can make.

He does not fear the heat of fire
nor the swallowing call of the sea
he fears what comes from above
the crushing blow of rock on rock.

No one will hear from his mouth
the cry across the endless horizon.
Does he wait for another day?
Or for a death by a million meteorites?

Third Place: THE BALLAD OF METEORITE JOHN

Ralph Harvey

Way way far south where sheets of ice shrink mountains into molehills,
where the toughest folk that ever were will tremble at the windchills,
where sunshine never seems to warm 'cause Summer's just bright Winter,
where showing off your face is dumb 'cause then your nose will splinter,
where you and I, we normal folk, if housed in yellow teepees,
would hold it in so very long we'd prob'ly burst our peepees,
there was a man, a quiet man, by the name of Meteorite John,
who searched that ice for bits of sky that fell down there upon.
Two score and more the years went by, and as those decades finished,
the joys of smaller meteorites had started to diminish.
"They're too damned small" he said with angst, "to be of any use!
I'm tired of them things so small there's nothing there to lose!"
And soon the needs of scientists in John's mind paled and faded;
his outlook towards the specimens became completely jaded.
He motioned toward a chondrite, basket-sized and partly weathered ,
and said "this one will grace my home, and keep my dear dog tethered."
"And that one over there," he cried." is just the perfect size,
to hold down all my papers, as you probably surmised,"
"And this small one, fully rounded, will look dandy on my hat,
and that shiny carbonaceous is a nice toy for my cat,"
"That one down there beside the flag would make a dandy tie-pin,"
"and that howardite will be a plate where my bananas ripen,"
"And cufflinks, I need cufflinks!" he said holding up a pair,
"They are a little heavy but they add a certain flair,
And this one here, with lonsdaleite, I'll have set in my tooth,"
"And this larger one I'll send away to please my sister Ruth"
"And this tiny one, a little gem will dangle from my ear,"
"While this shiny one a ring will make to flash when nerds come near,"
"but what I need, I truly need," he said with arms spread wide,
"is one this size to lure myself a really willing bride!"
And so he set out searching, and although it seemed too heavy,
he found himself an iron bigger than the biggest Chevy,
He chipped away beneath it to make room for a fuel sledge,
and as that giant weight began to teeter on the edge,
his patience finally ended and he gave a little shove,
and down it came and buried John 'neath Heaven from above.

And the moral of the story for you, listener, so patient,
is to recognize the value of these rocks that are so ancient.
For many of the smallest are among the most profound,
and it's better to collect those than be crushed into the ground.

Honorable Mention: 'She checked that the CCAM line was not the TFL'

James Salmon

She was a meteoriticist; and that is more than any physicist.
Her work was never ever done; what was that inside 84001?
She knew that Widmanstätten is not just a nice pattern,
and tales of a fall were invariably tall.
Angular clasts were signs of a blast,
and shock stages were seen at all ages
But stones that are brecciated; they might not be related.
In the lab her skills analytic revealed textures poikilitic.
Finding the mesostasis was always the basis
and given a while, she found any volatile
Her hands never had a jitter, even cleaving Almahatta Sitta,
and that red dusting? Surely limonitic rusting
But a polymict lunar; was it a pesky Ivuna?
And that shiny Gibeon? Perhaps simply a wrong'un!
She knew that CAIs would never tell lies
and the SNCs were her ABCs
She could tell a tektite was not a eucrite
and chondrules in naklites
never do belong.

Her name should be in lights!
And give that girl a gong!
For she knew the meteorites
from all the meteorwrongs

Other Contributions

Jupiter’s Slave

Eva Palmeri

I am Jupiter’s slave
His gravity controls me
If I escape, I die
Or float away
I can be large or small
I can be a c, s, or m
I live between Jupiter and Mars
I am an asteroid

The Particularity of My Cosmic Life

P.J.Boston

Crickets and coyotes are the sounds of the cosmos in my life,
And every star ringing in my eye like a crystal bell
Snaps me to the galactic frame of reference
Though my grateful feet cling
To the comforting surface of the desert night.

And a burning meteor putting a welder's hole in the black velvet night
Melds my longing for the great voyages
To the sweet, sad flavor of my long ago
When the galaxy was open wide
And my rocketship was just over the next hill.

Inevitable

Dean Naston

The roar of the double-tailed dragon is heard
Above the cold, indifferent land
Changeling of the sky, the night
Disrupting star-crossed plans
Until a dawn that would be the last -
Two worlds, one path.

Allure

JL Silverman

I wasn’t born magnetic, but by the time I became a chip off the old, really, really old block of my parent’s stony iron, something changed. And I felt my magnetism as I soared unfettered, unimpeded. Who could stop me? Who’d dare cross my iron will, even if exhilarated by my unequivocal attraction?

Yet as I pull close to the blue orb before me, I’m ready to cause a sensation. Drifting for so long I no longer remember the place of my birth I draw towards that which is bigger than me. Towards that which grips my curiosity and draws me forward. Warm now and then too warm, I blaze. Stream fiery tails. Desire of hands outstretched in the direction of my glowing glory inspires me and I put on a show.

Ah, my light so bright and so brief for all the time I spent quietly in the dark.

Rip roar from the past to my time now under glass.

Named for mountains which cradled my landing.

Old Woman craggy though I may be, my appeal, my mystery, my riddles to solve,

I coyly smile that you reach for me still.

“Late Bloomer”

Steve Desch

Shuffling shyly along the perimeter,
slyly eyeing the dancers’ graceful turns,
but never venturing very close
to the cliques and couples in the central circle,
who paired up long ago...
until a gentle nudge from a jovial chaperone
sets her in motion,
and she spins onto the dance floor and,
as if by accident,
collides with her destiny;
and in that embrace,
at last,
meteorite

becomes

planet.

“Getting a HED; or two; or three ”

Peter Utas

Getting ahead
A headache ahead I foresee;
a meteor’s heading for me.
My head I can duck,
head off the bad luck,
and hope for a large HED.

Two heads are better than one
Of Howardites I have just one
Of Eucritic stones, alas, none
I’m hoping to buy
A Diogenite -- why?
Well, two HEDs are better than one.

Cerberus headlines
When taking them out to a show --
achondrites I set in a row;
the eucrites between
the others…..I mean
to make HED-lines, wherever I go.