Many thanks to Lucy’s cousin Alex for this!

Endeavour

She is a random spark afloat between two motes of thought,

A passing inspiration born of concentration lapse

Between distracted glances, as the eye and mind are caught,

Entranced, intrigued by her hypothesis – ‘perhaps’.

An aimless doodle, careless in the margins of a page

Too narrow to contain her truly marvellous potential;

Mitotic, as she multiplies and grows. With every stage

Another skin of detail forms, becoming exponential. 

She is excitement – viral and infectiously memetic,

Blossoming in brightly coloured posters. She is free

Food – a lunch bait irresistibly magnetic,

She is slideshows, eager signatures of all who come and see.

She is discussion – hours of argument, debate, dissent,

Fervent scribbles, judgements, conflict ultimately aimed

At survival of the fittest. She is time, so costly, spent.

She is parasitic piles of paper – crumpled, torn and maimed,

Still breeding fast, still feeding on constraints and indecision.

She is the final path – the fight-or-flight response – cast in

An irreversible reaction. The formation of a vision,

She is fixation, firm commitment, a desire to chase; to win. 

 

She is meetings, minutes, emails ricocheting off the walls

Of cyberspace, exerting pressure with their heated voices.

She is days and weeks spent mastering, manipulating all

The data that describe her, bit by bit. She is the choices

By their hundreds made; the slow, controlled collapse

Of quantum waveforms forming into certainties like cells.

She is tentative experiment, dead ends and half-slept naps

Between exhaustive research and rare, welcome snacking spells.

She is journeys made across the miles – made time and time again.

She is evenings freely given, sacrificed to her creation,

She is early mornings, cold nights in the heavy snow and rain,

Unrelentingly endured. She is devotion; dedication.

She is missed appointments, postponed dates, erratic meals,

The parents, friends and lovers left behind with empty space

Attempting to replace the face that struggles to conceal

A fondness mingled with regret, joy mingled with disgrace.

She is their understanding, their unwavering support,

Forgiveness for each absence, consolation at each turn

Where obstacles and failures are encountered, answers sought.

She is persistence, ingenuity, another skill to learn;

Another trick to master, to pass on and to evolve.

She is incessant whirring of industrial machines,

The hum and thrum and rumble as metallic seeds revolve

Into a perfect symmetry spun from precision genes.

She is microscopic. She is perfect balance wired

Like angels dancing on a pinhead. She is invisible

Circuitry, she is fragility, she is inspired

Design, miniature components – indivisible.

She is dexterity – essential gentleness spread through

Each carbon fibre of her being. She is delicate control

Of resin mixed like spider silk, and lightly dabbed anew

Upon each precious surface, like a kiss. Across the whole

She is a thousand soft caresses laid down. She is imperfection,

And forty hands that cannot stand to sand it. She is pain;

Monotony of mindless tasks; exhaustion, disaffection,

She is perseverance through so many aches and sprains and strains.

She is hours spent in A&E, blood loss and nervous damage,

Bruised egos and hot tempers, angry comments bitten back.

She is resilience, she is ability to manage

And to solder on regardless, and to pick up all the slack.  

She is laughter; she is friendship; she is banter; she is fun

She is evenings out to dinner, bad jokes, teasing; stress forgot.

She is the same old songs, the singalongs – the badly sung

Renditions of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. She is one thing we’ve got.

 

She is unchained metallurgy, her alloy bones forever

Fixed, fused in the heat of compromise. She is the tension

In each member – stressed, compressed, so close together;

Bending over backwards; every moment in suspension.

She is strength in their unity. She is the colligation

Of each strand of epidermis, woven into complex forms

Surpassing helical simplicity. She is the transformation

From soft skin to carbon carapace – cocooned pupa reborn.

She is electric. She is rhythm beaten out in jolts

At fifteen hundred rpm. She is the current snaking

Through her veins, so irresistible, respiring volt by volt,

While she brings light to life – ecstatic energy awaking. 

She is youth and inexperience, with wisdom as the guide

Supporting her first shaky steps into the world, while we,

Creators, looking proudly on, are deified

By our rare progeny: Electric Blue, Audacity

Embodied. She is change, a shift in paradigm, still new.

She is a challenge to incumbents, daring enterprise,

An unexpected supernova, eclipsing them from view:

She is beauty, shining like the sun, and one day she will rise.    

 

Now mocked by mere mirages she is destined to outlast

As they die into echoes of the heights she will attain.

She’ll forge ahead, a link to future from a vanished past -

Forever our Endeavour, she will never break the chain.

- A.J. 2009