Verse 2

Please don’t squeeze me until I’m
yours reads the greengrocer’s sign
on his ripe avocados
whose enticing location
in a tilted tray on the
footpath outside his shop says,
we live in a country of
ripe words, which is why the im-
print of memory may be
all that mars the surfaces
where the outlines of trees can
seem to rise up at any
time and become the shadows
of runners circling the park
a green Link bus goes past with
me in it, thinking, ‘How can
I know what memory is
going to offer me unless
I can feel it’s ready to?’

How did we do it?

We found that there was an anti reflective coating on one side of the lens we were able to then machine text onto this plastic coating using the UV nanosecond pulsed laser. The students that chose this design wanted the text to be in a spiral. The computer graphics for this design took the longest out of any of them. What was need was a single line font that could be spun into a spiral we tried different packages but couldn’t map the text onto a spiral finally using three different programs and a mathematical formula we were able to wrap the text into the spiral you see at only 0.8 mm across.

Verse 1

SEM image of the machined coal

Shadow stands up under the
trees in Victoria Park
whose own filigree shadows lie
across matted russet leaves
on the sodden green turf that
the morning’s tai chi moves
barely mar – I see this from
the Link bus window as we
cross the intersection at
the bottom of the hill where
Kathmandu’s winter sale fails
to persuade me there’s much to
gain from any promise of
warmth other than what I get
when, while rain rattles against
the bedroom window at dawn,
I press my ear to the smooth
skin between Donna’s shoulder-
blades and hear, in the hollow
chamber where she’s making dream
words, a voice that’s not the
same as hers say eerily,
‘Shadow stands up.’ It’s morning.

How did we do it?

One of the difficulties in machining on coal was not being able see through the camera on the machining stage so we weren’t sure whether we had actually machined the coal until we put it under the electron microscope. Another problem was the large cracks in the coal so we had to make the text larger than the other poems so that we could see the text over the microscopic landscape of the coals surface. We used the femtosecond laser in direct write to scribe the text into the coal. The text is ~3 mm across.