Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like
his.

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

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.

I saw a star slide down the sky, 
Blinding the north as it went by,
Too burning and too quick to hold,
Too lovely to be bought or sold,
Good only to make wishes on
And then forever to be gone.

The Earthlings arrived unannounced, entered
without knocking, removed their shoes 
and began clipping their toenails. 
They let the clippings fall wherever.  
They sighed loudly as if inconvenienced.
We were patient. We knew our guests
were in an unfamiliar environment; they needed 
time to adjust. For dinner, we prepared
turkey meatloaf with a side of cauliflower. 
This is too dry, they said.
This is not like what our mothers made. 
We wanted to offer a tour of our world, 
demonstrate how we freed ourselves 
from the prisons of linear time.
But the Earthlings were already spelunking 
our closets, prying tools 
from their containers and holding them 
to the light. What’s this? they demanded.
What’s this? What’s this? And what’s this?
That’s a Quantum Annihilator; put that down.
That’s a Particle Grinder; please put that down.  
We could show you how to heal the sick, we said.
We could help you feed every nation, commune 
with the all-seeing sentient energy that palpitates 
through all known forms of matter. 
Nah! they said. Teach us to vaporize a mountain! 
Teach us to turn the moon into revenue! 
Then the Earthlings 
left a faucet running and flooded our basement.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.

When the blazing sun is set,
And the grass with dew is wet,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.

Then the traveler in the dark
Thanks you for your tiny spark,
He could not see where to go
If you did not twinkle so.

In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut your eye
Till the sun is in the sky.

As your bright and tiny spark
Lights the traveler in the dark,
Though I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

^{translated from the Japanese by William George Aston}

’Twas the new moon! 
Since then I waited—
And lo! to-night!
[I have my reward!]

<sup>“Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.”

—Reuters, 8/24/2011</sup>

Like the universe’s largest engagement ring, it twirls

and sparkles its way through infinity.

The citizens of the new world know about luxury.

They can live for a thousand years.

Their hearts are little clocks

with silver pendulums pulsing inside,

Eyes like onyx, teeth like pearl.

But it’s not always easy. They know hunger.

They starve. A field made of diamond

is impossible to plow; shovels crumble and fold

like paper animals. So frequent is famine,

that when two people get married,

one gives the other a locket filled with dirt.

That’s the rare thing, the treasured thing, there.

It takes decades to save for,

but the ground beneath them glows,

and people find a way.

On Earth, when my wife is sleeping,

I like to look out at the sky.

I like to watch TV shows about supernovas,

and contemplate things that are endless

like the heavens and, maybe, love.

I can drink coffee and eat apples whenever I want.

Things grow everywhere, and so much is possible,

but on the news tonight: a debate about who

can love each other forever and who cannot.

There was a time when it would’ve been illegal

for my wife to be my wife. Her skin,

my household of privilege. Sometimes,

I wish I could move to another planet.

Sometimes, I wonder what worlds are out there.

I turn off the TV because the news rarely makes

the right decision on its own. But even as the room

goes blacker than the gaps between galaxies,

I can hear the echoes: who is allowed to hold

the ones they wish to hold, who can reach

into the night, who can press his or her

own ear against another’s chest and listen

to a heartbeat telling stories in the dark.

Imagine you're on Mars, looking at earth,
a swirl of colors in the distance.
Tell us what you miss most, or least.

Let your feelings rise to the surface.
Skim that surface with a tiny net. 
Now you're getting the hang of it.

Tell us your story slantwise,
streetwise, in the disguise
of an astronaut in his suit.     

Tell us something we didn't know
before: how words mean things
we didn't know we knew.

                                                        Viewed from space, the world’s
                                                         impersonal.
                                                                              France appears,
                                                         but no Frenchmen.
                                                                                         Then Germany,
                                                         without one German.
                                                                                                   Regardless,
                                                         the richest man on earth
                                                         pays three hundred thousand
                                                         for a ten-minute flight by rocket
                                                         at three thousand miles per hour
                                                         to see everything below
                                                         from sixty-two miles straight up.
                                                         He’s making business plans
                                                         for space, beginning with Mars
                                                         and the moon. 
                                                                                       There’s ample
                                                         precedent to show how profit
                                                         motivates.
                                                                            After we mapped
                                                         the earth as we imagined it,
                                                         we matched what we imagined
                                                         with the world as it would look
                                                         when photographed from space.
                                                         We did the same with rivers,
                                                         lakes and seas.
                                                                                        We kept
                                                         the original names unchanged
                                                         for everything we saw
                                                         as far as we could fly. 
                                                         From seashores to the stratosphere
                                                         the world was seen as property
                                                         that men could bargain for and buy.
                                                         We see it now the same
                                                         while profiteers debate how best 
                                                         to advertise and sell the sky.

before this lake turned the color of ripened cherries, before
there was a word for weapon or distance or phone,
a star finished up its nucleosynthesis,
exploded its hydrogen, helium, neon and nitrogen, its sulfur
and iron, all over cosmos town. No one was around,
no one with vision or a craving for lemons.
All there was: stars and exploding stars seeding the universe
with magnesium and carbon, with graphite and diamonds.
All this, and what all else, collected into a pomegranitic
bulge that became our sun, that became the rocky planets
and the gaseous ones, that became the generous
light through pines, us and our armpit glands,
us and our Mother, may I? No, you may not. This was how it began,
before it cooled enough for worms and flukes, way cooler
than that instant when everything that would ever be
became, though it would be a while before figs and plumage,
rain drops and touch. But soon we had gnawing,
and soon we had fathers. Falling water
and falling in love. Before long there was work, and there was wine.
Observances like the Feast of Assumption. Soon after
there was rot and grief. But before that: electrons
and quarks. Protons and neutrons. Somehow, we got hummingbirds
and pavement, dorsal fins and cilantro. Somehow, anger
and shame and faith. Now we are a place
for lace and egrets. Now we have mouthwash and redwoods.
It’s sweet like a good pear, sour like probiotic yogurt.
It began and it seems, like a novel
by Tolstoy, like it will never end, but one day—zip-zap, zap-zip—
the sun will supernova, and we will give back
our copper and plutonium, our aluminum
and titanium. The calcium in our bones will contract into dimensionless
singularity, along with all our shiny silver fillings, our stalks
of wheat, our shocks of turquoise hair.

^{translated from the Spanish by Aaron Coleman}

It’s melting helplessly,
the North Star.
Ten million, and still more
tons every day
(ice, cold light, gas)
waste away from the frame
of this immense animal.

You will see,
if you look just over there,
how our team of conservators
keeps putting puffs of cotton
in the empty spaces.
But this won’t be enough
and within four centuries at most
navigators will have
to blindly feel their way across the sea.

What responsibility!
The animal that costs us most
and the one we can conserve the least.

La Estrella Polar

Se descongela sin remedio
la Estrella Polar.
Diez millones, y aún más
diarios de toneladas
(hielo, luz fría, gas)
pierde de su estructura
este immenso animal.

En los sitios vacíos
verán,
miren ustedes hacia allá,
cómo nuestro equipo restaurador
va colocando masas de algodón.
Pero eso no puede bastar
y dentro de cuatros siglos a lo sumo
los navegantes tendrán
que andar a tientas por el mar.

¡Qué responsabilidad!
El animal que más nos cuesta
y el que menos se puede conservar.

The astronaut told us
he didn’t look out the window
for eight and a half minutes
as the rocket launched him
beyond our atmosphere.
Terrifying things happened—
ground vanished, boosters
exploded, day became
night—and he did not look.
He was focusing,
he said, on his job.

He was up there
a long time. He learned
to sleep suspended. He learned
how the sunrise looks
when you watch it every morning
from the soft dark mouth
of space. Many things,
he told us, were different
than he’d once expected.
There’s no space ice cream,
he said. That’s a big hoax.
His vision blurred.
His body became a study:
blood, appetite, cognitive function.

He took many pictures.
All of them were beautiful.
None of them showed
what it was like to float.

When the astronaut returned
to earth, more tests were run.
Scientists discovered that
seven percent of his genes
had changed in space.
He left the planet
as himself. He came back
as himself, rearranged.

^{translated from the Arabic by Ameen Rihani}

The secret of the day and night is in
The constellations, which forever spin
       Around each other in the comet-dust;—
The comet-dust and humankind are kin.

(We Come from the Stars)

Stellar nucleosynthesis.
That explains 
where everything

in our universe

came from according to astrophysicists who 
only recently discovered the cosmological constant causing
the expansion

of our universe.

Our creation story tells us we came from the stars to this place Bdote
where the Minnesota and Mississippi rivers converge,
our journey along the Wanaġi Caŋku, 

in our universe,

that stargazers later called the Milky Way now disappearing 
in the excessive glow of a million million urban uplights. 
The original inhabitants of this place,

of our universe,

we are Wicaŋhpi Oyate, People
and will remain here as long as 
we can see ourselves 

in the stars.

^{18 February 2021}

We've landed on the planet named after the god of war and the power's
out all over Texas my mother's buried under her grandmother's
quilt while they're looking for signs of life on the surface of the long-dried lake-
bed my cousins huddling around the clay pot heaters they've rigged
from overturned geraniums and the candles they keep lit
for the dead the heatshield reaching extreme temperatures in the final moments
of descent ice-sleeved branches cleaving from their trunks and downing
communication lines and lines and lines down the block for what's left
of clean water in the ancient river delta the rover arriving to drill down
as scientists cheer in control towers oil men feast and fatten
their pockets craters across the desolate expanse early
transmission from the hazard avoidance camera can't help
but capture its own shadow darkening the foreground.

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.