Astronomers Are Keeping an Eye on This Asteroid’s Odds of Hitting Earth
by Franziska Roesner
(The New York Times, 1/29/2025)
this morning’s snowperson is a sad lump already
soft like an aging snow cone around the underbelly
woodchip eyes and buttons in a heap.
when I drunk dial my senators I find their voice
mailboxes full, a useless phone tree that doesn’t grow
when you water it.
they say one small asteroid can decimate a city
not extinction but pretty damn inconvenient, the way
resistance can come from a few.
I wonder if my vision is improving, the pink
mountain looking closer and crisper at dusk. I stop each day
to genuflect before it, just in case.
at night I think of the solar-powered probe
they landed on a comet, sent 6.5 billion precise kilometers
just to roll into the shade—
look at what we can do. look at what we can’t.
Franzi (Franziska) Roesner is a professor of computer science at the University of Washington. She was a poet first, though, and has returned to poetry recently. Her poetry has appeared or will appear in Rust & Moth, Eunoia Review, Third Wednesday, The Loch Raven Review, and others. She lives in Seattle with her husband, two daughters, and one remaining cat.
Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash