by Kate Gleason, Keene, New Hampshire, U.S.A.
They’re all the brighter for our dark-adapted
eyes, a sky clear and unpolluted
by the moon, which is in its new phase
where it doesn’t show, and there’s no corona
of artificial glow from a city, nothing damping down
the pitch above the hill where we sit, a chill beginning
to seep through our summer jackets and shorts,
the grass leaving its alphabet in the backs of our thighs.
Falling stars, we call them, but we know they’re specks of dust
from the Comet Swift-Tuttle and that we’re passing
through its tail of debris, these tiny motes that blaze to nothing
in the atmosphere, their brilliance corresponding in scale
to the speed at which they’re going. One by one,
they leap across the night like a nerve impulse in the brain,
a synaptic frazzle, scritch-mark of a struck match.
Above them, the constellations are riveting
the sky together, rising from our wish to see patterns
in the sprawl and lines we imagine closing the distance
between stars, giving the darkness a form we can recognize,
say the hourglass of Hercules, or the Herdsman’s rogue kite,
its string tethered to nothing tonight, or the Summer Triangle
that is just now starting to point toward the horizon’s mound
and the sector of night grown electric with dashes of light
while we sit on a hill and tilt our heads back, counting.
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- This poem received an honorable in the adult category of GAM 2012 Astropoetry contest.
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