Analysis of Aurora's Wheelchair



Aurora's eyes sparkle
with "a 35 mile an hour consciousness.
Nothing under 35 miles an hour registers on her retinas.
She has been in motion since the day she was born.
She started with the baby carriage,
went to the roller skates, went to the skateboard,
now she's in the car,
and she's headed for the wheelchair.'

Then one day, the scientists nanomerically spliced
an oxygene atom, creating a new form of aerodynamic energy. In 3 years, stratospheric dwellings were designed and sold to the public. Aurora was spellbound by the advertisement:
   'Are you tired of boring sunsets, limited horizons,
    and the confinements of being earthbound?
    Discover a new perspective of this world
    on the Argo...completely self-contained...'  

Aurora turned the voice off and imagined leaving the Earth. She had always been repulsed as a child at the sight of dirt, and asphalt as an adult. She scoffed at Johann Wyss who had only been able to imagine a Swiss family living aloft in a tree like monkeys.
Selling all her earthly possessions, she bought an Argo.
Aurora went to live on the edge of space.

The scientists could not logically explain why the Argos began falling from the sky. The structural, mechanical flaws remained an insolvable mystery. Only metals and plastics survived the impact with the Earth. No corpses were found in the nanoparticles of debris descending from an altitude of 15 miles above the Earth.

Aurora's ship did not fall from the sky. The scientists were ominously silent, except to say that Aurora's ship would eventually fall, and that Aurora was a nanocorpse that had exploded on the walls and windows of her Argo coffin. There were ethical arguments about mankind's existential place in the Universe, the cost expenditures involved in grandiose selfishness, and the force of gravity that strangled the Earth.

Years later, charged with luminous solar particles,
Aurora's ship glitters in the night sky
like a man-made star.
The scientists cannot comprehend
why Aurora refuses to fall
from her isolation
on the edge of space...


Scheme XAAXXXBX XXXXXX XXC D D XXBXXXC
Poetic Form
Metre 1110 101110100 10101110100101 111010101111 110101010 1101011101 11001 0110101 111010011 111001001110010100010101000101101001011100100 11101101100010 0011101 01001010111 101101 0101011001010011111011011011101110111110111101101010011001001001110 10101001011110 01011110111 0100111000110101101010100010010111100101001001001101110010011010101110110101 1111110101000100010011111110100010101010111010101010101010101001000111101001001010001001100001110011001 1101110010100 11100011 10111 01001001 101001011 10010 10111
Characters 2,087
Words 369
Sentences 23
Stanzas 6
Stanza Lengths 8, 6, 3, 1, 1, 7
Lines Amount 26
Letters per line (avg) 63
Words per line (avg) 13
Letters per stanza (avg) 274
Words per stanza (avg) 56

About this poem

I wrote this poem because I enjoy sci-fi fantasy and the controversial twist at the end was fun to contemplate.

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Written on March 09, 2012

Submitted by firemage777 on November 26, 2022

Modified on April 06, 2023

1:52 min read
5

Linda Elin Arnott

University of Arizona graduate 2013. I have been writing poetry for many years. I have an identical twin and we live in Tucson. more…

All Linda Elin Arnott poems | Linda Elin Arnott Books

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