At Age 28, Chilean Astronomer Maritza Soto Has Already Discovered Three Planets

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.

Credit

Copyright © 2021 by Vincent Toro. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on February 19, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“This poem was incited in me when four distinct ideas simultaneously converged. The first was the news of Chilean astronomer Maritza Soto having identified three new celestial objects in the universe. La Silla Observatory, where Soto first glimpsed these planets, is located near the Atacama desert in Chile, a place which was famously used to dispose of the bodies of those ‘disappeared’ by the state during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. Here in the U.S. there is also an active policy of ‘disappearing’ Latinx people, and in coping with this painful history of ‘disappearing’ Latinx and Latin American people from the Western Hemisphere, I turned to Sun Ra, who famously claimed that Black people were from another planet and stranded here on Earth, and that his music was an interstellar transmission to the home planet to come rescue them. Drawing from Sun Ra’s invented mythology, I found myself imagining that the planets Soto identified are where Latin America’s disappeared have re-emerged to populate worlds where Latinx people can live without the scourge of racialized oppression and hostility. Lastly, I thought of Dr. Grisel Acosta’s essay ‘The Invisible Latina Intellectual,’ which is about how American mass media has tried to erase the significant intellectual labor of Latinas and suppress any notion of Latina genius. So, the poem is an attempt to celebrate the genius of Latin American women, to serve as an elegy to Latinx and Latin American people that have been the recipient of imperial brutality, and to imagine that somewhere in the universe there is a place where we as Latinx people can embody our unique cultures, ethnicities, and histories without violence and repression.”
—Vincent Toro