Jodrell Bank
Got bored with the football (England 0 Algeria 0…zzzzz). Tedious. Depressing. Decided to read some poetry instead. Found this, by Patric Dickinson, called Jodrell Bank. Is football just another expression of loneliness?
Who were they, what lonely men
Imposed upon the fact of night
The fiction of constellations
And made commensurable
The distances between
Themselves their loves and their doubt
Of government and nations;
Who made the dark stable
When the light was not? Now
We receive the blind codes
Of spaces beyond the span
Of our myths, and a long dead star
May only echo how
There are no loves nor gods
Men can invent to explain
How lonely all men are.
In the Dark 
June 21, 2010 at 11:33 am
It’s from a collection called “The World I See”, which was published in 1960. The poem was inspired by a visit to Jodrell Bank observatory.
August 27, 2010 at 7:17 pm
I studied this poem as part of my O level literature syllabus (in an anthology called Poets Of Our Time I think) and it was so good that I still remember it off by heart. I even managed to recite it perfectly after several vodka red bulls while watching the Perseids a few weeks ago. Mint.
December 18, 2010 at 1:51 am
I first found jodrell bank almost decades ago when a child. Still it defines my take on things.