leonids
LEONIDS OVER US
by Marge Piercy

The sky is streaked with them

burning holes in black space –

like fireworks, someone says

all friendly in the dark chill

of Newcomb Hollow in November,

friends known only by voices.


 
We lie on the cold sand and it

embraces us, this beach

where locals never go in summer

and boast of their absence. Now

we lie eyes open to the flowers

of white ice that blaze over us


 
and seem to imprint directly

on our brains. I feel the earth,

rolling beneath as we face out

into the endlessness we usually

ignore. Past the evanescent

meteors, infinity pulls hard.

NOTE: The Leonids is a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Tempel-Tuttle. The Leonids get their name from the location of their radiant in the constellation Leo: the meteors appear to radiate from that point in the sky. (Read more at wikipedia.org.)

Photo: Leonids meteor shower, 2009

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Poet, novelist, and essayist Marge Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1936. She won a scholarship to the University of Michigan and later earned a master’s degree from Northwestern University. She has published fifteen books of poetry, including Colors Passing Through Us (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme (1999), Early Grrrl: The Early Poems of Marge Piercy (1999), What Are Big Girls Made Of? (1997), Mars and Her Children (1992), Available Light (1988), Circles on the Water: Selected Poems of Marge Piercy (1982), and The Moon Is Always Female (1980). She is also the author of a collection of essays on poetry, Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt (1982). The most recent of Piercy’s fifteen novels are Three Women (1999), Storm Tide (with Ira Wood, 1998), City of Darkness, City of Light (1996), The Longings of Women (1994), and He, She and It (1991). Piercy lives with her husband, writer Ira Wood, in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Visit her online at margepiercy.com. (Source: poets.org)