Chris Hadfield, Space Poet

Commander Chris Hadfield returns to Earth tonight after five months on the ISS. During that time, he went from 20,000 Twitter followers to more than 825,000.

By tweeting celestial images, explaining the finer details of life in space on YouTube, and participating in one of Reddit's most popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, the outgoing ISS commander has become a social network rock star. By performing live with a earthbound Canadian band Barenaked Ladies, and posting a slightly modified rendition of David Bowie's Space Oddity to mark the end of his stay on ISS, he has proven himself an actual rock star.

Hadfield is an advocate for manned space travel to Mars: "It is the next logical step for man, and obviously I would love to be a part of that." And for self-preservation: "Last night's Russian meteorite strike is a good reminder that detecting asteroid threats is good for our health." He also takes the best selfies in the universe.

But perhaps Hadfield's most overlooked quality is his penchant for lyrical observations. To illustrate this, I crafted a poem entirely from the commander's more romantic tweets.

"Good morning, Earth!" As tweeted by ISS Commander Chris Hadfield (click the * for original tweets). Good morning, Earth! [*] 750,000 people are seeing the world from this perspective. [*] Just here, tears don't fall. [*] A view to put the mind at ease. [*] The wondrously wildly beautiful surface of our world. [*] An angry thunderstorm stands out against infinity. [*] A two-dimensional fountain, a river spurting and fanning into the sea. [*] The river hiccups like a zipper on an old coat. [*] The sun glint turns this river to liquid silver. [*] The beautiful and violent ugliness inside a naked volcano. [*] An island like splatter. [*] The gentle earthlights twinkle, the bright ones are clear. [*] The Earth bubbled and spat like boiling porridge, long ago. [*] An African river perpetually vomiting into the Indian Ocean. [*] Sand and water playing hide and seek on the African east coast. [*] The dry folded skin of the Sahara desert, looking like the crust of a pie. [*] Ancient Saharan stone, burnished by eternal sand and wind. [*] Manila in the night, like a vase full of flowers. [*] The Greek islands, like delicate shattered eggshell pieces. [*] The yin and yang of ice and land at Lake of the Woods. [*] Gasp? like a giant beast, sloughing off the last of the winter's snow. [*] Dubai, the Palm Island like a trilobite in the night. [*] A heraldic spring dragon of ice roars rampant off the coast of Newfoundland. [*] The Galapagos?just far enough apart to give Darwin something to think about. [*] Ships waiting their turn at the Panama Canal's western mouth. One amazing feat of engineering viewed from another. [*] This is what happens when engineers turn to agriculture. [*] The ethereal wisp of cloud over water, white on blue, to the eternal blackness of the universe [*]; a blackness like endless velvet. [*] In proportion, our atmosphere is no thicker than the varnish on a globe. Deceptively fragile. [*] Our Moon, tinted blue, made so by the wisp of Earth's atmosphere. [*] Our Sun is immensely, unfathomably powerful. [*] The first light of the rising sun turns our solar arrays to woven gold. [*] A wondrous experience; [*] Life in a cosmic shooting gallery. [*] Spacewalk at the end of Station, the furthest reach of any human in existence. [*] But I do believe we're not alone in the universe. [*] It's not easy putting on the Sokhol pressure suit - a tight squeeze. Like being born in reverse. [*] We undock for our fiery fall back to Earth [*] ?a human meteorite. [*]

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/chris-hadfield-space-poet-15465863?src=rss

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