Ode to the Tardigrade

by Miles T. Ranter

Tardigrade on the Moon—
will you perish soon?
Parked in her immense
left eye, you have the sense

(since there is neither air
nor moss nor water there)
to curl into a ball,
dry out and, thus, forestall

the death that would ensue
for anyone but you.
A wizard at survival
you’ve not a single rival,

for when an asteroid
dives headlong from the void
and pummels us, you’ll chuckle
as we collapse and buckle.

For half a billion years
through sea-changed biospheres,
you’ve been here. There’s no doubt
your mastery stands out,

your expertise at cheating
the Reaper as you’re heating
to feverish degrees
or cooling down to freeze

(without so much as sneezing,
shivering, or wheezing)
to paralyzing zero.
And so, my tiny hero,

when we again alight
upon the Moon some night,
be kind and do not chortle
at souls so frail and mortal!

___________________________

(Appeared in Celestial Euphony, Plum White Press.)

303rd Weekly Poetry Contest

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Comments

Actually. I believe the

Actually. I believe the tardigrade has a fairly short live span under normal conditions. It's just that it can hibernate for extended periods without aging under extreme conditions.

Bruce Boston

Hi Bruce. Thanks for stopping by! Yes, you are probably right. I guess my poem is a bit fanciful. There was a robotic lander carrying tardigrades, however, that crashed on the moon. Imagining tardigrades hibernating on the lunar surface was my initial inspiration for this piece. Who knows, perhaps they'll wake up someday when astronauts land on the moon again and immerse them in warm water!

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Here is an excerpt from one

Here is an excerpt from one of the articles I had read about the tardigrades crash-landing on the moon: "When you look up at the moon, there may now be a few thousand water bears looking back at you. The Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the moon during a failed landing attempt on April 11. In doing so, it may have strewn the lunar surface with thousands of dehydrated tardigrades, Wired reported yesterday (Aug. 5, 2019). Beresheet was a robotic lander. Though it didn't transport astronauts, it carried human DNA samples, along with the aforementioned tardigrades and 30 million very small digitized pages of information about human society and culture. However, it's unknown if the archive — and the water bears — survived the explosive impact when Beresheet crashed, according to Wired."

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Here's another excerpt from a

Here's another excerpt from a different article: "In all likelihood then, the tardigrades in the library are still sitting there in their dehydrated dormant state as they were, waiting to be revived again. They can’t do that on their own, though; they need to be brought back to Earth so they can be exposed to an atmosphere again. Only then can they be rehydrated, so there is little worry about them taking over and colonizing the moon!"

Ode to the Tardigrade