“Exam week… and last panegyric
Extolling new site of chem lyric:
A step energizing
In verse-enterprising;
A blue shift, in terms atmospheric!”
This essay will mark the first time my original limerick will have been written for a different site, as I’ll share new poems on Bluesky, moving forward. I still am only about halfway through the Twitter poems from last April; thus, next semester will be an interesting blend of Twitter and Bluesky links, before the NaPoWriMo2024 set of poems is fully readdressed via the essays here. Regardless, this will be my last regular blog entry for Autumn 2024, after a long semester.
“Exam week… and last panegyric /
Extolling new site of chem lyric…”
It’s Finals Week on campus, so it’s a logical time to bring the autumn sequence of essays to a close. My first few Bluesky posts have been rather sporadic, as I get used to the website (the “new site of chem lyric”), but it has been interesting and fun to rediscover other science poetry and creative work there. I hope to move soon to a focus that’s not merely the novelty of the location, and I’ll designate this poem the “last panegyric,” in support of that aspiration.
“A step energizing /
In verse-enterprising; /
A blue shift, in terms atmospheric!”
“Red shift” and “blue shift” are phrases used to efficiently communicate about spectroscopic behaviors of chemical samples (i.e., how do substances interact with various types of light?).
Red shifts, or bathochromic shifts, are seen when an energy-lowering effect is observed in a spectroscopic environment; blue shifts, or hypsochromic shifts, are seen when an energy-increasing effect is observed in a spectroscopic environment. This makes sense given the relative behaviors of visible light: in the ROYGBIV rainbow, red light has the lowest energy and longest wavelength, while blue light is much nearer to the other extreme.
The autumn’s Bluesky shift (the “blue shift, in terms atmospheric”) has been a “step energizing” in terms of my creative writing (“verse-enterprising”), since I had mostly fallen out of that habit, aside from NaPoWriMo, in recent years.
While it is promising to look toward the hope and potential of the new semester and year, I am certainly glad for December’s break from academic routines, in the meantime.
Chemphasis 