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    Cosmonauts do it in Heaven
    Cosmonauts do it in Heaven
    Cosmonauts do it in Heaven
    Ebook136 pages45 minutes

    Cosmonauts do it in Heaven

    By Keith Gottschalk

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    About this ebook

    Keith Gottschalk is one of very few English language poets after Walt Whitman to compose poems celebrating engineers, inventions, and scientists. With wit and paradox, these poems explore our solar system, and celebrate astronomers and spaceflight. This collection opens with an imaginary trip through time from Copernicus to Einstein those who literally made space as we conceptualise it today. It closes with an imaginary trip through our solar system. In between, we find moving elegies to astronauts who lost their lives, and celebrations of a glittering international constellation of engineers, inventors, mathematicians, and researchers. Irony, allusions, double-entendres, and wonderment are always looking over the reader s shoulder. Many of these poems, composed over thirty-four years, have already been individually published to acclaim in literary and other magazines.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHands-On Books
    Release dateNov 30, 2020
    ISBN9781928433224
    Cosmonauts do it in Heaven
    Author

    Keith Gottschalk

    Keith Gottschalk published his collection of prison & other protest poems, Emergency Poems, in 1992. He served on the executive of the Congress of South Africa Writers, COSAW, in the 1980s, and today hosts the Lansdowne Local Writers' Group. He has performed and published over 160 poems, the latter in many magazines. A Fulbright scholar, Keith lectures in Political Studies at the University of the Western Cape.

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      Book preview

      Cosmonauts do it in Heaven - Keith Gottschalk

      Acknowledgements

      MAKING SPACE

      The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of these States; Who believes not only in our globe with its sun and moon, but in other globes with their suns and moons …

      – Walt Whitman: Kosmos

      True Confessions:

      WHO REALLY GAVE NIC COPERNICUS THE IDEA

      THAT PTOLEMY & THE CHURCH HAD GOT IT ALL WRONG

      one moonful night

      Copernicus’s lover whispered:

      "darling, the earth moved"

      Street-smart canon of Frauenburg cathedral

      Nicolas Copernicus 1473–1543

      his maths kept coming out wrong – it was simplest to argue:

      our earth revolves around the sun

      when our eyes tell us – the sun revolves around the earth

      – & more than our eyes told us that.

      his bishop begged his canon, Copernicus: publish.

      his cardinal cajoled his canon, Copernicus: publish.

      but Dr Copernicus knew what was good for his health.

      to contemporaries of the Inquisition

      publication might just mean priority

      for more than a learned journal.

      so in the closet his manuscript stagnated.

      the author’s quill added a dedication to the pope.

      without telling the author

      frightened publisher added a preface

      that this was only a work of fiction; but still

      countdown to this book launch kept being put on: hold.

      his equations insisted: it is simplest to argue

      our earth revolves around the sun

      but his throat got this dry sensation

      that Occam’s razor was not the only cut-throat in town.

      canons know all about predestination vs free will

      free will can choose: the closet – or the casket.

      Ptolemy was wrong?

      Aristarchus was right?

      our eyes & inner ear deceive?

      equations tell the truth?

      dying, last sacrament, Copernicus confessed:

      "I held back publication 36 years

      for thought of the scorn which I had to fear

      on account of the novelty & incongruity of my theory."

      discreet to the last, cathedral servant,

      it was more than scorn.

      481 years before Salman Rushdie’s verses

      this street-smart canon knew:

      only publish when you die

      lest you die when you publish.

      The Unstarry Messenger

      Galileo Galilei 1564–1642

      it’s hard to live up to being a legend

      when your back aches & your sight’s failing

      & you only wanted to be a telescope salesman

      not a martyr.

      discovering spots on the sun, phases of Venus

      moons orbiting Jupiter:

      – measuring mountains on the moon

      as low as the mountains in Italy

      between university & inquisition.

      1616 – NEWS COMMUNIQUE – AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE:

      VATICAN BANS EARTH FROM ORBITING AROUND THE SUN

      Galileo Galilei’s scope couldn’t see –

      the day it shattered the crystalline spheres of the heavens

      will be the day Vatican politics shat all over you:

      for 206 years the hard porn of Doctor Pole & Professor Pisa

      rotted on the Index.

      1822 – NEWSFLASH – REUTERS:

      VATICAN UNBANS EARTH FROM ORBITING AROUND THE SUN

      starry-eyed messenger bearing the news:

      discoverers are never ahead of their time

      – the establishment is behind the times.

      1992 – NEWSBITE – CNN:

      VATICAN APOLOGISES TO GALILEO

      after 13 years of appeal hearings

      the politburo of the Vatican central committee

      pronounced that during the Inquisition’s proceedings

      grave violations of Catholic legality

      brought canon law into disrepute

      & rules:

      Galileo Galilei

      is posthumously

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