#Goddard2Goddard #SpacePoetry

Calling all students and alumni! Have you ever imagined your poetry sailing among the stars? NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center wants your artwork, poetry, short prose, videos, and songs on board their OSIRIS-REx spacecraft bound for the asteroid Bennu. And so we thought…Goddard and Goddard! We’d love to see what sparks in your imagination when you consider exploration, the universe, and the essence of the human spirit.

Want to dream, write, play with us? There are two ways to do it.

First, if you have a poem, lyric, piece of flash fiction to share, you can tweet a link or image of it yourself to @OSIRISREx, hashtag #WeTheExplorers. (Here are the instructions). If you add the hastag #Goddard2Goddard or tag @goddardmfaw we will nab it too and retweet. We may even grab it for a special page on the blog if the idea starts to take off.

Second, you can help us write our own Goddard2Goddard poem. How does it work? Simple.  One person writes the first half of a sentence beginning “If.”  Another person writes the second half of the sentence beginning “then the.”  Then they get slotted together to create mysterious, surrealist, space age ideas.

For example:

Elena writes:  “If I was launched into space,”

Then without knowing what she’s written, Reiko writes,

“then the mouth of the ocean would be the mouth of the stars.”

So the co-written line becomes

“If I was launched into space, then the mouth of the ocean would be the mouth of the stars.”

And then another pair adds their line.

Want to do it?

Let’s make it simple. In the comments on the blog post #Goddard@Goddard #SpacePoetry, add your half a line, whichever fragment appeals to you. (Start with either “If” or “then the.”)  We will mix and match them in a magic “vortext” and voila!

Space Poetry, tweeted into the stars.