Supersonic Boom Poem by gershon hepner

When dinosaurs swished their huge tails
they made a louder boom
than, mournfully, the humming whales
beneath the ocean flume,
or fighters in the stratosphere
exceeding speed of sound
that splits the drums of every ear
of creatures on the ground.

Today you cannot hear the crack
of dinosaurs who’d whip
appendages that power pack,
and human tongue and lip
can’t emulate, because the climate
caused all of them to die,
though there are some presumptious primates
who give it their best try.

I wish I also had a tail
whose supersonic boom
could show the females what this male
has got, and tell them whom
I want to come to me to do
the things I need and more,
without the need to give the cue
humanely with a roar.

If the barrier of sound
were one that I could break,
I’d hightail, high above the ground,
and progress like a rake,
more than the dinosaurs audacious,
delighted to be linked
to creatures that are post-Cretaceous,
and not yet quite extinct.


Dr. Nathan P. Myhrvold of Microsoft Corporation is studying the way that Apatosaurus may have been able to create a supersonic boom when it cracked it tail like a whip. He calls his field cyber paleontology (John Noble Wilford, 'Did Dinosaurs Break the Sound Barrier? ' NYT,12/2/97) .

12/2/97,12/11/08