Lost In Space

      I try to have a Substack post ready every week to ten days. I try not to repeat myself or create too much overlap in the poems I share and sometimes it’s hard to think of atopic people might find interesting. I was going to go for something on poetry forms that I have tried but which aren’t the usual counted syllable/sonnet/villanelle forms but I have just found something else that I want to share first.

        I try to have a Substack post ready every week to ten days. I try not to repeat myself or create too much overlap in the poems I share and sometimes it’s hard to think of atopic people might find interesting. I was going to go for something on poetry forms that I have tried but which aren’t the usual counted syllable/sonnet/villanelle forms but I have just found something else that I want to share first.

  I ought to explain what prompted this.

        I submitted a few poems to the lovely Starbeck Orion ( @starbeckorion7 ) here on Substack. As part of the submission I had to say what my favourite constellation was. Alas, Reader, I did not have one, despite being Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s biggest fan. Incidentally, don’t you miss the optimistic and respectful universe he and the crew of the Starship Enterprise inhabited? I was eleven when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. Space travel and the idea of worlds beyond the Earth are to me subjects of fascination and wonder. Everyone knows poets write about the moon, we can’t help it - it pulls us just as it pulls the oceans. But space is more than the moon, it’s the ultimate mystery for me. I got a bit annoyed by the recent bevvy of rich women who went up in a rocket, came back after fifteen minutes and started talking all sorts of nonsense about love, doing it for the sisterhood and all that. I felt affronted on behalf of the Earth, the moon, the Solar System and all the scientists involved in the study of the Universe. The only thing that assuages the beauty, sadness and magnificence of it all is poetry.  We are made of stardust after all.  So…here we go:

Ad Inexplorata

for Michael Collins, astronaut.

Let us go, boldly,  into the unknown.

Let’s say we go one hundred thousand miles,

far enough for everyone to gain perspective.

From such a distance we can look back,

see the blue and white marble which is the planet

suspended in a ripe blackness of universe.

The borders we guard so zealously

will be invisible, our ghettos, our keep out, keep

off zones dissolved in a deepness of blue

and we will be able, for a moment at least,

to understand what poets mean

when they speak of beauty.

Out there, we will know silence,

the only reasonable response to the truth of where

we have come from and our audacity in leaving.

The First Deep Field View From The James Webb Telescope

We see the bloom of time,

stare back into that first light,

the universe travels to greet us,

stretches itself into waves

of infrared that lap upon the skin.

We watch and our eyes prickle

with the stardust of billions of years

and the wonder of our beginning.

Rocket Launch As Metaphor

T-1 minute.

Vibration within normal parameters.

Launch.

(the issue of physics in relation to

the human body)

G-force within normal parameters.

No blackout.

Full consciousness.

T+ 2.5 clear the Von Karman line.

The edge of space.

Weightlessness.

(we return to the

free float of the womb

umbilicals of technology)

T+ 8. Orbit established.

Cloud formation indicates storms below.

T+90. One orbital cycle complete.

Functioning within normal parameters.

This is the right distance

to achieve perspective

(to function within

normal

parameters.)