I get up early hoping
I’ll encounter the line drawn
under night time, the red streak
that bisects the shadow of
dawn standing up, horizon
of dark buildings in the east
whose windows begin to flash,
the gassy aquamarine
sky pouring itself into
the gaps between high-rise glass,
laser-streaks of gulls lit by
the afterburn of early
sunrise over there where hope
appears inevitable
and unwise, but worth getting
up early enough for, to
remember why you do this.

How did we do it?

Machining glass is always challenging for laser machining however the femtosecond laser makes it easy to machine these difficult materials. The problem with imaging the poem was that the pedestal is in the way of the microscope objective so we ended up having to use long focal length camera with a telescopic zoom on it. The whole poem is only 0.8 mm making it one of the smallest poems.