Poems about the James Webb Space Telescope

In Competition No. 3261, you were invited to submit a poem about the James Webb Space Telescope.

The first dazzling images captured by its infrared eyes were a welcome antidote to our terrestrial woes. They brought to mind the moment in the film Contact when Jodie Foster’s character comes face to face with a celestial object for the first time and says: ‘They should have sent a poet.’

So, it’s over to you. An honourable mention to Bruce Bennett; the winners below snaffle £25 each.

“Much have I travelled in the realms of space 

Past supergiants and dying galaxies, 

With floating rubble tossed on cosmic seas 

A million miles from Earth’s familiar face. 

A watcher of the skies, I can record 

The birth of dust-enshrouded stars, long dead; 

Imploding voids on which black holes have fed 

Behind celestial borders, unexplored. 

Time-travelling, I shall complete my task, 

Revealing scenes beyond imagination 

To catch the first birth-pangs of our creation – 

A triumph for the team. And yet I ask:

      An image of the ancient past unfolds 

      But who can picture what the future holds?. 

Sylvia Fairley

“In the deep and trackless spaces 

wait the fragments of a Bang: 

the Universe goes through its paces, 

      free from sturm, devoid of drang 

puts its best face forward, smiling, 

      lolls in sheen and unseen light, 

welcomes – oh it is beguiling! – 

this paparazzo neophyte: 

hanging in a distant orbit, 

      unfolding its beryllium lens. 

To capture time, it must absorb it, 

      show us what the past intends: 

watching nebulae reverse 

      and galaxies in utero – 

it blinks, a cosmic sphinx, immersed 

      in how the dusty clusters grow. 

Bill Greenwell

“The telescopic kite-shaped wonder stealing Hubble’s cosmic thunder 

Launched and sailed without a blunder or a flaw, 

And now its gilded mirrors lumine vivid nebulae no human, 

Stegosaurus or ichneumon ever saw. 

 

With pioneering engineering, after endless persevering, 

Homo sapiens is peering back in time 

At swirling galaxies that traffic through the void; the spectrographic 

Simulacra are seraphic and sublime. 

 

The teeming nameless constellations beaming countless scintillations 

Via infrared pulsations they disperse 

Are universally demanding we expand our understanding 

Of our rapidly expanding universe. 

 

Amazed, we let our gazes rove around each novel supernova, 

Thanking science and Jehovah for the sight 

Of starlight being born and dying, while our clever race is spying 

On it all, with mirrors flying on a kite. 

Alex Steelsmith

“À la recherche du temps perdu –  

the telescope surveys 

those galaxies we never knew 

existed in the haze. 

 

Time past: the universe’s birth, 

the origins of life. 

How small our puny little Earth, 

how trivial our strife. 

 

Infrared vision lets it peer 

back before Genesis. 

And will Creation now be clear 

and not some dark abyss? 

 

The start of time – it outdoes Proust 

in scale of memory 

and all without that magic boost 

of madeleine and tea. 

D.A. Prince

“Space has not anything to show more fair; 

Webb’s telescope reveals the galaxies, 

its camera lays eternal treasures bare, 

jewelled nebulae, the hue of fantasies. 

One million miles from Earth it marks the stars, 

a kite without a string, a spacecraft drifting, 

maps planets, fiery Jupiter and Mars, 

sees gases form, and cosmic stardust shifting. 

Orbs opalescent, shimmeringly displayed, 

such images make staff at Nasa weep, 

their details put the Hubble in the shade, 

and as we gaze, our awestruck questions creep; 

amongst those exoplanets, is there life? 

will future travellers roam this glow-filled night, 

this final frontier, far from earthly strife? 

In time, you’ll see McDonald’s on the right. 

Janine Beacham

“So now this mighty disembodied eye, 

Released from earthly bounds, commands the sky 

And with its poised and penetrating stare 

Lays ever more galactic secrets bare. 

It gives an autopsy of space and time 

That is at once both awful and sublime: 

Sidereal deaths, immeasurably past, 

Occur on scales incalculably vast. 

To delve these bloody entrails is to see 

The empyrean in its infancy. 

Were human life exposed to such a gaze, 

We’d see regression to its primal phase – 

A person shrink and dwindle to a germ, 

The first conjunction of an egg and sperm. 

      Did we foresee such ends when we began 

      To view the heavens with a godlike scan? 

W.J. Webster

No. 3264: surreptitious sonnet

You are invited to submit a poem inspired by this journal entry, written by Wallace Stevens on 3 August 1906: ‘Engaged at the office all day on a sonnet – surreptitiously.’ Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 24 August.