title: More Things in Heaven and Earth: Poets and Astronomers Read the Night Sky
author: David H. Levy
description: In 1995 David Levy returned to Acadia to receive an honorary doctorate of science. On that occasion he delivered an inspirational Convocation Address that brought the audience to its feet and that forms the Introduction to this book. Comparing the gravitational power of Jupiter, which shattered Comet S-L 9 into twenty-one pieces, to the Moon's gravity which causes the world's highest tides in the Bay of Fundy, Levy said in his address, "I felt the power of S-L 9 being torn apart by Jupiter when I was at Cape Split four days ago. For one hour, I heard the Moon roar." Levy regards the cataclysmic collision of these fragments with Jupiter as a wonderful opportunity to get a whole new generation excited about science, as people were thrilled by the space missions culminating in the 1969 Moon landing. He has appeared at many high school auditoriums around Nova Scotia giving his memorable presentations of cosmic happenings. But Levy, whose Bachelor's and Master's degrees were both in English Literature with emphasis on poetry, also points out the poetry that is in science and the science in poetry, citing the great poets who have written about the night sky, such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Keats, Tennyson, Hopkins and Frost. The celestial collision of 1994, the greatest in the history of astronomy, was to him as much about poetry as about science; it was for him a climactic moment in the pursuit of a dream that began with long nights on the roof of Acadia's Crowell Tower residence in Wolfville.
zlib_text: ![](Images/image00590.jpeg)
  
  Clarkesworld Magazine
  
  Issue 64
  
  Table of Contents
  
   _Scattered Along the River of Heaven_
  
  by Aliette de Bodard
  
   _What Everyone Remembers_
  
  by Rahul Kanakia
  
   _All the Painted Stars_
  
  by Gwendolyn Clare
  
   _The Future Sounds of Yesterday: A Sequence of Synthesizers in Science
  Fiction_
  
  by Christopher Bahn
  
   _Things You Will Never Understand: A Conversation with Robert Jackson
  Bennett_
  
  by Jeremy L. C. Jones
  
   _2011 Reader's Survey_
  
  by Neil Clarke
  
   _Rockman_
  
  Art by Arthur Wang
  
  ![](Images/image00559.jpeg)
  
  © Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012  
  www.clarkesworldmagazine.com
  
   **Scattered Along the River of Heaven**
  
  Aliette de Bodard
  
   _I grieve to think of the stars_  
   _Our ancestors our gods_  
   _Scattered like hairpin wounds_  
   _Along the River of Heaven_  
   _So tell me_  
   _Is it fitting that I spend my days here_  
   _A guest in those dark, forlorn halls?_
  
  ![](Images/image00559.jpeg)
  
  This is the first poem Xu Anshi gave to us; the first memory she shared