We step out

We step out
into what is just
our backyard.

“I may again return”

“…I may again return,

I love you, I depart from materials,

I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.”

–from Walt Whitman’s “So Long!”

Voyager’s View

  

Leaping into the void

  

Two paths to beauty

Two paths to beauty
Voyager had to choose one
so Pluto waited.

Saw the shore

Saw the shore
and kept on sailing
to the void.

Storyteller

Someday, you will stop talking
or we will stop listening

but for these few years

what a story you’ve told!

Of slinging past planets
on the way to somewhere else
and dragon-less boundaries.

How wide-eyed
and attentive we’ve been
to each twist and turn.

When your story with us ends,
you must retell it again
from the beginning–
leaving nothing out!

Hopefully,
the next star will listen.

Because I could not go to Space –

A loving rewrite of two lines of Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death -“.

spacecraft and rovers

Spacecraft and rovers from Earth to upper right: Hubble Space Telescope (image credit: NASA), lunar rover Yutu (image credit: China space), Mars rover Curiosity (image credit: NASA/JPL), Cassini (image credit: NASA/JPL), Rosetta (image credit: ESA, image by AOES Medialab), New Horizons (image credit: NASA), Voyager (image credit: NASA), and Pioneer (image credit: NASA).

posthumous poetry

Cut text from an 1889 journal article pasted onto a graphic from Dionysius Lardner’s “Popular Astronomy.”