A Selection of Modern and Contemporary Poems
on Astronomical Themes
Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Delay
Elizabeth JenningsThe radiance of the star that leans on me
Was shining years ago. The light that now
Glitters up there my eyes may never see,
And so the time lag teases me with howLove that loves now may not reach me until
Its first desire is spent. The star's impulse
Must wait for eyes to claim it beautiful
And love arrived may find us somewhere else.
Against Cosmology
Mark PerlbergI don't care that the universe is fifteen
billion years old.I don't care that it contains more dark matter
than the leaping zillions of stars,that there is more empty space
in the universe than anything.Move close to me. This is our day on Earth
like any other average miraculous day.
We Are Listening
Diane AckermanAs our metal eyes wake to absolute light,
where whispers fly from the beginning of time,
we cup our ears to the heavens: we are listening.On the volcanic rim of Flagstaff and in the fields beyond Boston,
in a great array that blooms like coral from the desert floor,
on high-wire webs patrolled by computer spiders in Puerto Rico,
we are listening for a sound beyond us, beyond the sound,
searching for a lighthouse in the breakwaters of our uncertainty,
an electronic murmur, a bright, fragile I am.Small as tree frogs staking out one end of an endless swamp,
we are listening through the longest night we imagine
which dawns between the life and times of stars.(Note: I transcribed this poem from an audio file, so its line breaks and punctuation may be off.)
Astronomy Lesson
Alan ShapiroThe two boys lean out on the railing
of the front porch, looking up.
Behind them they can hear their mother
in one room watching “Name That Tune,”
their father in another watching
a Walter Cronkite Special, the TVs
turned up high and higher till they
each can’t hear the other’s show.
The older boy is saying that no matter
how many stars you counted there were
always more stars beyond them
and beyond the stars black space
going on forever in all directions,
so that even if you flew up
millions and millions of years
you’d be no closer to the end
of it than they were now
here on the porch on Tuesday night
in the middle of summer.
The younger boy can think somehow
only of his mother’s closet,
how he likes to crawl in back
behind the heavy drapery
of shirts, nightgowns and dresses,
into the sheer black where
no matter how close he holds
his hand up to his face
there’s no hand ever, no
face to hold it to.A woman from another street
is calling to her stray cat or dog,
clapping and whistling it in,
and farther away deep in the city
sirens now and again
veer in and out of hearing.The boys edge closer, shoulder
to shoulder now, sad Ptolemies,
the older looking up, the younger
as he thinks back straight ahead
into the black leaves of the maple
where the street lights flicker
like another watery skein of stars.
“Name That Tune” and Walter Cronkite
struggle like rough water
to rise above each other.
And the woman now comes walking
in a nightgown down the middle
of the street, clapping and
whistling, while the older boy
goes on about what light years
are, and solar winds, black holes,
and how the sun is cooling
and what will happen to
them all when it is cold.
Stars
Ralph BurnsI sit and rock my son to sleep. It rains
and rains. Such as we are
both asleep, we swim past the stars,
bad stars of disaster, good stars of the backboneof night. We know these stars as they are
and as we'd wish them to be, Milky Way,
Dog and Bear, hydrogen and helium, the 92
elements which make all we know of beauty.We know nothing of angular size or
of the inverse square law of the propagation
of light, and swim through a cold, thin
gas, between and among the stars,which swim likewise between two creations
like children who know sleep intimately.* * *
First the collapse of the interstellar gasses,
then the final collapse of the luminous stars
like eyes turning backward in their sockets
returning the atoms they have synthesizedback into space, to dust, back to what they were.
We look from some kind of opening to nothing.
We locate the red giant and the dwarf star
for nothing. They are going away –their explosions from within and their luster,
their mixed-up views on time and space.
I know that those I love are some
Of the falling objects, and those dark waves
rise toward us from the past, dark
that falls with any particle of light.
Farder to Reache
Albert GoldbarthKepler was born in 1571. He knew about as much of the night sky and its mysteries as anyone alive in his time. We might say his skull contained the sky of the 16th and early 17th centuries, held it in place like a planetarium dome. Today we still haven't improved on his famous three Laws of Planetary Motion.
And yet the notion that the universe might be infinite--that there wasn't an outermost sphere of stars that bound it all in--terrified him, filled him with what he termed "secret, hidden horror. . . One finds oneself wandering in this immensity in which are denied limits and center."
This is, of course, the dread of free verse, that one might fall into Whitman and freefloat directionlessly forever. Whitman calls himself "a Kosmos," and in "Song of Myself" the vision is of a creation whose parts are "limitless" and "numberless" --these words and their kin are used with manic glee and with a great intentionality. This is poetry's announcement of the given of 20th-century astronomy: the universe is, so far as we know, unbounded.
But it isn't easy to walk through a day of fists and kisses, paychecks, diaperstains, tirejacks, and our buildingblock aspirations, with the mind fixed on infinity. Every year in beginning poetry classes hands startle up in protest of free verse, "it isn't poetry," which is metered and rhymed, and so is a kind of map of Kepler's universe.
John Donne's poems, for instance--he was born one year after' Kepler. And he praises his lover by placing her at the center of an onion-ring sky: "so many spheres, but one heaven make," and "they are all concentric unto thee."
And yet as early as 1577 --Kepler was only 6 years old -- the British astronomer Thomas Digges undid the outer sphere, and published a vision of stars in endlessness: .Of which lightes celestiall, it is to bee I thoughte that we onely behoulde sutch as are in the inferioure partes . . . even tyll our sighte being not able farder to reache or conceyve, the greatest part rest by reason of their wonderfull distance invisible unto us."
Perhaps infinity isn't discovered along a timeline of gathering progress, but by certain sensibility, no matter when it lives.
In that land of simultaneous sensibility, I think I could knock on Kepler's door and invite him out for some beers with Whitman. Really: he's flinging his cloak on now.
It’s a foggy night as we sit around the verandah overlooking the lake. The sky is cloudy, and so are my two friends' faces--they don't know
each other, are guarded, and rely on me to ease the conversation.
1 do, though; or maybe it's the beer. It turns out we can shoot the shit all night, stein after stein, anecdote on anecdote, until the first light swarms over the water like thistledown on fire. Then the fog disappears---which is, of course, the day clearing its throat for speech.
Somebody Ought to Write a Poem for Ptolemy
Jacqueline OsherowSomebody ought to write a poem for Ptolemy,
So ingenious in being wrong, he was almost a poet.
Can anyone follow his configurations?
How he cut a tortured path for every planet
Until his numbers matched what he could see,
Every one spectacularly wrong.
You would think, in all those years of calculations,
He would, at least, have suspected a simpler way.
Maybe he even knew it all along—
The stationary sun, ellipses, everything—
But kept it to himself as too unseemly
Or to save his pregnant wife from all the spinning
And wait beside her in a quiet place
That he, himself, had rendered motionless.
Life in an Expanding Universe
Pattiann RogersIt’s not only all those
cosmic pinwheels with their charging solar
luminosities, the way they spin around
like the paper kind tacked to a tree trunk,
the way they expel matter and light
like fields of dandelions throwing off
waves of summer sparks in the wind,
the way they speed outward,
receding, creating new distances
simply by soaring into them.But it's also how the noisy
crow enlarges the territory
above the landscape at dawn, making
new multiple canyon spires in the sky
by the sharp towers and ledges
of its calling; and how the bighorn
expand the alpine meadows by repeating
inside their watching eyes every foil
of columbine and bell rue, all
the stretches of sedges, the candescences
of jagged slopes and crevices existing there.And though there isn't a method
to measure it yet, by finding
a golden-banded skipper on a buttonbush,
by seeing a blue whiptail streak
through desert scrub, by looking up
one night and imagining the fleeing
motions of the stars themselves, I know
my presence must swell one flutter-width
wider, accelerate one lizard-slip farther,
descend many stellar-fathoms deeper
than it ever was before.from Sex
Michael RyanAfter the earth finally touches the sun,
and the long explosion stops suddenly
like a heart run down,
the world might seem white and quiet
to something that watches it in the sky at night,
so something might feel small,
and feel nearly human pain.
[…]How do you get under your desire?
How do you peel away each desire
like ponderous clothes, one at a time,
until what’s underneath is known?
We knew genitals as small things
and we were ashamed they led us around,
even if the hill where we’d lie down
was the same hill the universe unfolded upon
all night, as we watched the stars,
when for once our breathing seemed to blend.
[…]
Across the Universe
John Lennon/Paul McCartneyWords are flying out like
endless rain into a paper cup
They slither while they pass
They slip away across the universe
Pools of sorrow waves of joy
are drifting thorough my open mind
Possessing and caressing meJai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my worldImages of broken light which
dance before me like a million eyes
That call me on and on across the universe
Thoughts meander like a
restless wind inside a letter box
they tumble blindly as
they make their way across the universeJai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my worldSounds of laughter shades of life
are ringing through my open ears
exciting and inviting me
Limitless undying love which
shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on across the universeJai guru deva om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Jai guru deva
Jai guru deva
Stars
Robert Frost (1874-1963)How countlessly they congregate
O'er our tumultuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as trees
When wintry winds do blow!--As if with keenness for our fate,
Our faltering few steps on
To white rest, and a place of rest
Invisible at dawn,--And yet with neither love nor hate,
Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva's snow-white marble eyes
Without the gift of sight.
from Renascence
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
… But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I'll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And -- sure enough! -- I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I 'most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.I screamed, and -- lo! -- Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind,
Held up before my eyes a glass
Through which my shrinking sight did pass
Until it seemed I must behold
Immensity made manifold;
Whispered to me a word whose sound
Deafened the air for worlds around,
And brought unmuffled to my ears
The gossiping of friendly spheres,
The creaking of the tented sky,
The ticking of Eternity.I saw and heard, and knew at last
The How and Why of all things, past,
And present, and forevermore.
The Universe, cleft to the core,
Lay open to my probing sense…
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