Kepler-22b, poem by Tamara Madison (May Poetry Series)

Kepler-22b
by Tamara Madison

There you are at last!
I’m sure it’s you –
I can almost see you
there, waving at me:
my twin, my soul mate
my lover. Now
I can give up my search.
It’s only a matter of time
when we’ll be together
my love, my perfect
love. At last
someone who sees me
who knows me
who understands me
without words,
someone whom I too
will see and understand –
someone I can devote
my life to.
It will not matter
that our arms
may not match
that our bodies
may not fit
that we have no
common language
but the language
of desire
pulsing from your heart
to mine
over the mere 600 light years
that lie in the vast
and hopeful darkness
between your balmy
juicy world
and mine.

IMAGE: Artist’s conception of Kepler-22b (Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech).

NOTE: Kepler-22b is an extrasolar planet orbiting G-type star Kepler-22, located about 600 light years from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus. Discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope in 2011, it is the first known transiting planet to orbit within the habitable zone of a Sun-like star — the region where liquid water, a requirement for life on Earth, could persist. The planet is 2.4 times the size of Earth. (Read more at wikipedia.org.)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Tamara Madison teaches English and French at a public high school in Los Angeles. Raised on a citrus farm in the California desert, Tamara’s life has taken her many places, including Europe and the former Soviet Union, where she spent fifteen months in the 1970s. A swimmer and dog lover, Tamara says, “All I ever wanted to do with my life was write, and I mostly write poetry because it suits my lifestyle; I like the way one can say so much in the economical space of a poem.”

Culture and the Universe, poem by Simon J. Ortiz

CULTURE AND THE UNIVERSE
by Simon J. Ortiz

Two nights ago
in the canyon darkness,
only the half-moon and stars,
only mere men.
Prayer, faith, love,
existence.
                       We are measured
by vastness beyond ourselves.
Dark is light.
Stone is rising.
 
I don’t know
if humankind understands
culture: the act
of being human
is not easy knowledge.
 
With painted wooden sticks
and feathers, we journey
into the canyon toward stone,
a massive presence
in midwinter.
 
We stop.
                       Lean into me.
The universe
sings in quiet meditation.
We are wordless:
I am in you.
Without knowing why
culture needs our knowledge,
we are one self in the canyon.
And the stone wall
I lean upon spins me
wordless and silent
to the reach of stars
and to the heavens within.
It’s not humankind after all
nor is it culture
that limits us.
It is the vastness
we do not enter.
It is the stars
we do not let own us.
***
“Culture and the Universe” appears in Simon J. Ortiz‘s collection Out There Somewhere (University of Arizona Press, 2002).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Simon J. Ortiz, an Acoma Pueblo Indian, was born and raised near Albuquerque, New Mexico, grew up speaking the Acoma tongue. After attending Fort Lewis College and the University of New Mexico, Ortiz earned a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from the University of Iowa in 1969. In the early 1970s he began to write in earnest while teaching at various colleges, and in 1982 won a Pushcart Prize and a wide audience with From Sand Creek. His work also includes 1992’s Woven Stone—a spiritual autobiography that blends poetry and prose. (Read more at poetryfoundation.org)

PHOTO: “Stars over Bryce Canyon” (Utah) by Dana Sohm, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Spider Crystal Ascension, poem by Charles Wright

SPIDER CRYSTAL ASCENSION
by Charles Wright

The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way, drifts on his web through the night sky
And looks down, waiting for us to ascend …
 
At dawn he is still there, invisible, short of breath, mending his net.
 
All morning we look for the white face to rise from the lake like a tiny star.
And when it does, we lie back in our watery hair and rock.
***
“Spider Crystal Ascension” by Charles Wright appears in Country Music: Selected Early Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1982)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Charles Wright (born August 25, 1935) is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac. (Read more at wikipedia.org)

PHOTO: “A twisted star-forming web in Galaxy IC 342” (NASA). Note: Looking like a spider’s web swirled into a spiral, the galaxy IC 342 presents its delicate pattern of dust in this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Seen in infrared light, the faint starlight gives way to the glowing bright patterns of dust found throughout the galaxy’s disk. (Read more at nasa.gov)

Halley’s Comet, poem by Stanley Kunitz

HALLEY’S COMET
by Stanley Kunitz 

Miss Murphy in first grade
wrote its name in chalk
across the board and told us
it was roaring down the stormtracks
of the Milky Way at frightful speed
and if it wandered off its course
and smashed into the earth
there’d be no school tomorrow.
A red-bearded preacher from the hills
with a wild look in his eyes
stood in the public square
at the playground’s edge
proclaiming he was sent by God
to save every one of us,
even the little children.
“Repent, ye sinners!” he shouted,
waving his hand-lettered sign.
At supper I felt sad to think
that it was probably
the last meal I’d share
with my mother and my sisters;
but I felt excited too
and scarcely touched my plate.
So mother scolded me
and sent me early to my room.
The whole family’s asleep
except for me. They never heard me steal
into the stairwell hall and climb
the ladder to the fresh night air.
Look for me, Father, on the roof
of the red brick building
at the foot of Green Street—
that’s where we live, you know, on the top floor.
I’m the boy in the white flannel gown
sprawled on this coarse gravel bed
searching the starry sky,
waiting for the world to end.
***
“Halley’s Comet” appears in The Collected Poems: Stanley Kunitz (W. W. Norton & Company, 2000)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) became the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States in the autumn of 2000. Kunitz was ninety-five years old at the time, still actively publishing and promoting poetry to new generations of readers. In the New York Times Book Review, Robert Campbell noted that Kunitz’s selection as poet laureate “affirms his stature as perhaps the most distinguished living American poet.”Atlantic Monthly contributor David Barber cited Kunitz as “not only one of the most widely admired figures in contemporary poetry but also, rarer still, a true ambassador for his art.” (Read more at poetryfoundation.org.)

PHOTO: Halley’s Comet, NASA (1986)

NOTE: Halley’s Comet is a “periodic” comet and returns to Earth’s vicinity about every 75 years, making it possible for a human to see it twice in his or her lifetime. The last time it was here was in 1986, and it is projected to return in 2061. The comet is named after English astronomer Edmond Halley, who examined reports of a comet approaching Earth in 1531, 1607 and 1682. He concluded that these three comets were actually the same comet returning over and over again, and predicted the comet would come again in 1758.  (Read more at space.com)

Light-years, poem by Hester Knibbe

LIGHT-YEARS
by Hester Knibbe (Translated by Jacquelyn Pope)

It’s a beautiful world, you said,
with these trees, marshes, deserts,
grasses, rivers and seas
 
and so on. And the moon is really something
in its circuits
of relative radiance. Include
 
the wingèd M, voluptuous
Venus, hotheaded Mars, that lucky devil
J and cranky Saturn, of course, plus
 
U and N and the wanderer P, in short
the whole solar family, complete with its
Milky Way, and count up all the other
 
systems with dots and spots and in
that endless emptiness what you’ve got
is a commotion of you-know-what. It’s a beautiful
 
universe, you said, just take a good look
through the desert’s dark glasses
for instance or on your back
 
in seas of grass, take a good look
at the deluge of that Rorschach—we’re standing out there
somewhere, together.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Hester Knibbe’s books of poems include Oogsteen (2009) and Bedrieglijke dagen (2008), both from De Arbeiderspers. She received the A. Roland Holst prize in 2009.

PHOTO: “Desert Snow” by Wally Pacholka/Astropics.com, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Note on photo: Constellation Canis Major with the brightest star of night sky, Sirius, shines above Southern California’s Joshua Tree National Park (December 2008).

Afterwards I Stayed Out for an Hour…Poem by John Brantingham

AFTERWARDS I STAYED OUT FOR AN HOUR BEFORE THEY MADE ME COME IN
by John Brantingham

I must have been eleven,
(or maybe I was twelve)
the first time I noticed a satellite.

It was the first really warm day of summer
in 1982 (or maybe it was 1983)
when the wind coming off the desert
had blown the smog out of L.A.
and the street lights
seemed to glare less than
usual, and that satellite crossed Orion,
the one constellation I knew, until it
got lost behind the orange
tree in my parent’s backyard.

By the time I’d climbed on
top of the garage to see it
again, it had vanished, and I
stood staring at each star individually—
squinting at each one, comparing
all of them to the stars nearby
making sure they stayed still—to see
if they too would lose their
grip on the night
and fall away into the sky.

PHOTO: “Orion Nebula Crossed by a Satellite” (celestronimages.com)

Just One Moon, quote by Haruki Murakami

“There was just one moon. That familiar, yellow, solitary moon. The same moon that silently floated over fields of pampas grass, the moon that rose–a gleaming, round saucer–over the calm surface of lakes, that tranquilly beamed down on the rooftops of fast-asleep houses. The same moon that brought the high tide to shore, that softly shone on the fur of animals and enveloped and protected travelers at night. The moon that, as a crescent, shaved slivers from the soul–or, as a new moon, silently bathed the earth in its own loneliness. THAT moon.”

HARUKI MURAKAMI, 1Q84

PHOTO: A full moon rises through a hazy sky past a string of green lights, Saturday, June 22, 2013, in Baltimore, Maryland. The moon reached its full stage on Sunday morning, June 23rd, when it was 13.5 percent closer to earth during a phenomenon known as supermoon. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

Albert Einstein, Fashionista

Once you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy.” ALBERT EINSTEIN

I shot the above photo this afternoon near LAX and was struck by the motorcyclist’s red and white striped helmet and red, white, and blue checked shirt. Must say I like his style!