As a child I wanted as many letters
in my bloodstream as the planet Mercury
would allow and so traveled the city
on buses late afternoons and read all the billboards
high above the streets and byways,
on sides of factories and churches and never
heard the sermons of the displaced
or blustery talk of founding fathers, and saddened
when a route snaked through long tunnels,
and then eased when reemerged
out of the murder of light.
I could feel my veins thicken like the winnings
of a Powerball, and the mystery of women
lounging around a gray-bearded man in a silk
smoking jacket drinking a tumbler of cognac
was like the easeful glide of a narcotic dream.
My mouth puckered whenever lemon-colored
arches appeared five stories above the city
like golden gates to an unforeseen heaven.
As a rule, I never glanced at other commuters
or curators in loosened ties and tuxedos
who clutched brown-papered bottles
and nodded to a stillness as though murdered in a film.
Instead, I glimpsed myself looking out a window,
awed by Cartier timepieces and luxury cars
that asked was I hungry for speed
or ordered me to let my body drive.
I ate advertisements like sea waves eating a coastline,
and though my sense of self was as bruised as a moldy peach,
I learned to infrared my longings from the inside
and to tally my suspicions from a distance, and now,
when I read a newspaper, I flutter like a sparrow
at a birdfeeder, and when language spills out
of my skull like a massive cruise ship docked
and towering over a line of ramshackle huts
on an island whose blessed poor gaze up
as though a locker of dollars fell at their feet,
my brain closes and my veins burst
as if pollinating the white face of the moon.
Copyright © 2022 by Major Jackson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 7, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,—
Sailed on a river of crystal light
Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring-fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we,"
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe;
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew;
The little stars were the herring-fish
That lived in the beautiful sea.
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish,—
Never afraid are we!"
So cried the stars to the fishermen three,
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam,—
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home:
'Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed
As if it could not be;
And some folk thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea;
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one's trundle-bed;
So shut your eyes while Mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:—
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.
This poem is in the public domain.
A silver Lucifer serves cocaine in cornucopia To some somnambulists of adolescent thighs draped in satirical draperies Peris in livery prepare Lethe for posthumous parvenues Delirious Avenues lit with the chandelier souls of infusoria from Pharoah's tombstones lead to mercurial doomsdays Odious oasis in furrowed phosphorous--- the eye-white sky-light white-light district of lunar lusts ---Stellectric signs "Wing shows on Starway" "Zodiac carrousel" Cyclones of ecstatic dust and ashes whirl crusaders from hallucinatory citadels of shattered glass into evacuate craters A flock of dreams browse on Necropolis From the shores of oval oceans in the oxidized Orient Onyx-eyed Odalisques and ornithologists observe the flight of Eros obsolete And "Immortality" mildews... in the museums of the moon "Nocturnal cyclops" "Crystal concubine" ------- Pocked with personification the fossil virgin of the skies waxes and wanes----
From The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by the Estate of Mina Loy. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
Face of the skies preside over our wonder. Fluorescent truant of heaven draw us under. Silver, circular corpse your decease infects us with unendurable ease, touching nerve-terminals to thermal icicles Coercive as coma, frail as bloom innuendoes of your inverse dawn suffuse the self; our every corpuscle become an elf.
From The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by the Estate of Mina Loy. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
A trip to Laredo is like breaking open the sky.
Each long row of wheat meets the eye
before it sloughs into desert, where the occasional hawk,
in a few concentric turns, identifies a weak movement.
I know this place. The place in between.
I have seen limbs of prickly pear hovering in the still, hot air,
clustered and distorted like a reef in reverse.
I have seen the hay bales lead me to ranch houses
with tin foil winks on every window
and a museum of appliances on every porch,
sliding from one world to another,
where there are trucks without wheels,
willows without spirits, and mesquites with nothing to lose.
I have seen the sun own the land. I have seen it bake
into our hands. And I have seen it sleep in a dark coverlet
while the sky opens loose, and the coyotes, in their constellation,
propose a trick. A star crosses with intelligence.
A rabbit becomes an antique. At the gas station in Cotulla,
I eat the moon in the form of a pie. A real U.F.O. in cellophane,
a chemically unctuous sweet. Each bite, with the physics of an asteroid,
crumbles onto the asphalt where purpling black spheres of gum
have each staked a claim on the cosmos. There is no claim
that cannot be shifted. There is no orbit that cannot be redone.
I have a stepfather who I call a father, who believes other life forms
are out there, far beyond our boastful sun. And I have seen
this moon pie has no bloodline. I have seen it orbit from
one home to another, a pre-made kindness at a pit stop
where something in the brush is changing up its cry.
Copyright © 2023 by Analicia Sotelo. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 20, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
a hole
a floating rib
an admirer’s shadow
ribs with grief
a taper hall
an empty street
a black hole
named love
its low density
like clouds, dust, cosmic ray
at the center of the milky way
thousands of them
i bet it hurts
your lungs
as air expands
tears through tissue
you inhale all the oxygen
from us in fifteen seconds
who can dust your bones?
time is infinite
i wish upon stars
not old enough for light to reach
wish upon a name
to leave your lips as print
even moon rocks crumble
zero point zero four inches
a million years
call it what it feels like
love
space junk
a dirty collision
a chain reaction
a thick cloud of debris
traveling fast
Copyright © 2022 by Boderra Joe. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 11, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.
This poem takes its title from the headline of an article published by Remezcla
on Sept. 21st, 2018.
Haloed by the glow of the multiverse swirling
above La Silla Observatory, your pyrex eye
spotted an orb three times the mass of Jupiter.
All these lenses leering at the heavens,
and yet it was you who identified
HD110014C. You were reluctant to call
it discovery, perhaps because you know
all too well what poisons gush forth
from that word. Or maybe you suspect
you are not the first because you
know there is no such thing
as firsts. Still, you did what no
gringo ever could: you made another world
visible to nosotrxs. Perchance it was HD110014C
that actually recognized you long before your
spectroscopic lens detected her.
It might even be that she had already
decided to entrust you with making
her presence known to our kind.
After all, you proved yourself more
than worthy of such responsibility
when you said your
finding was “not
exceptional,” annihilating
the misguided western patriarchal notion
of greatness too many others have used
to boost themselves since 1492.
You even confessed your introduction
to HD110014C
was entirely an accident,
a courageous admission that eclipses
the bumbling arrogance of every Columbus,
every Cortez, every Pizarro. From 300 million
light years away you glimpsed
another possibility, then befriended
two more exoplanets before
your 28th year around
our lilliputian sun. You,
sprung from a country
crystillized in its mourning
of the disappeared,
met a glorious
dawn and flash
fused to emerge
as one
woman search party.
Maestra Maritza, I know
this goes against all
scientific wisdom, but I can’t help but theorize
that these three interstellar marvels you’ve pulled
into our orbit have become a new home for those
that collapsed into the event horizon
of imperial cruelty. I like to suppose
that our gente were never erased
but rather beamed to a star system
that does not regard them as merely tool
or trinket, a galaxy where their dreams
are as important as those
who dwell in some imaginary
North. Could it be, Maritza,
that what you scoped out there among
the shimmering Allness was in fact
a reunion pachanga thrown on the gold
dust rings of a wandering star where discovery
is not a sword of Damocles but instead a feathered
reentry path for those who have been missing us.
Copyright © 2021 by Vincent Toro. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 19, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.
Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.
We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.
And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,
each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.
We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.
“In Praise of Mystery” by Ada Limón was released at the Library of Congress on June 1, 2023, in celebration of the poem’s engraving on NASA’s Europa Clipper, scheduled to launch in October of 2024. Copyright Ada Limón, 2023. All rights reserved. The reproduction of this poem may in no way be used for financial gain.