So I'll just put this here:
On Stabilizing a Lagrange Point
For three years we sat there
wrapping gravity strings
around an enormous rock.
Tighter, tighter, even tighter still,
an enormity our own feeble minds barely encompass.
And now we are done.
In space, just there,
where before there was nothing,
now is a different nothing--a nothingness--
connected by these tight invisible strings to the next nothingness,
impossibly remote.
The survey fleet is near.
The crews, I imagine, are anxious this morning,
seeing the point from the observation bays,
faint and shimmering.
Final preparations will be made,
equipment stowed,
checklists steadfastly processed.
Do they meanwhile imagine the rush of wind on their cheeks, the smell of salty air, the sound of sails unfurling?
Five seconds to move
farther than the travels of
all their ancestors.
Six planets, forty-two moons, one hundred seventeen asteroids,
accreted by processes inscrutably complex and improbable.
Yet here the fleet goes, to take their height and weight,
to determine how, precisely, our species will impose its will.
But our job, for the time being, is elsewhere.
-Ensign, make preparations to travel to Elcano system.
-Sir!