Poetry Wednesday - The Night I Fell Out of Bed (aged 57)

A scientific poem

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Good day Red Cabbage Heads,

This is a poem that I wrote after I fell out of bed for absolutely no reason. It tickled me as I hadn’t fallen out of bed that way since I was a child. I did a quick google around black holes as a was joking about gravity bending. And so a poem was born. I submitted it to ionosphere magazine and I was lucky enough to be one of 20 poets they picked to publish. They can be found here. The collection is available in an actual print version which is my first. Got to go on the dreaded Amazon to buy it unfortunately but it’s one more step onto the road of legitimacy I have built in my head for me.

The Night I Fell Out of Bed (aged 57)

Gravity is altered on my side of the room,
colliding black holes bend gravitational lines 
undulating waves disturbing my sleep,
the unstable mattress edge, alarming. 

The cast iron frame has warped and dipped,
the fabric of spacetime stretched long and 
tipped me to the floor like a rag doll
my fabric torn, my stuffing bruised. 

Scientists say that two black holes merged 
in a distant galaxy and the ripples of that
cataclysmic event were detected on Earth;
and unceremoniously threw me from my bed. 

(‘‘On September 14, 2015 at 09:50:45 UTC, the LIGO Hanford, WA, and Livingston, LA, observatories detected the coincident signal GW150914. The initial detection was made by low-latency searches for generic gravitational-wave transients and was reported within three minutes of data acquisition. Subsequently, matched-filter analyses that use relativistic models of compact binary waveforms recovered GW150914 as the most significant event from each detector for the observations reported here.’’ - published in Physical Review Letters.)

First published in ionosphere Vol 2:1 2025

So that’s the story of how I fell out of bed. That’s all for this week, ta-ra Tx

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