From your bones I built my planet
.
.
.
Within the cosmos,
Between the stars,
Blinded by the burning comets,
The scarlet tail,
Its icy shards,
I was afloat in the dark.
Spinning out of axis,
I dove into galaxies,
Within its spiraling arms.
Illuminated in Jupiter’s misery,
The unlit star,
I fell into your gravity,
Tugged by your soul’s call.
Hungry and hunted,
Trapped in each other,
We crash-landed on Callisto,
Dipped into its oceans,
Walked over its craters,
And upon its ancient lands,
Built our forever.
We gazed into each other’s eyes,
Lightyears passed in between,
We stood frozen in time,
Tethered by orbits unseen.
The land crumbled,
And soon we sank,
Dusted in the ashes of another lost world,
We ran.
From planet to planet,
Moon to moon,
We searched for a home to call our own.
We leapt from satellites to galaxies afar,
Traversed entire clusters of burnt-out stars,
You stood staring at our pale blue dot,
Longing for what we lost.
We traversed the burning plains of Io,
Watched the liquid flames consume it,
Europa laughed at our wretchedness,
The astronauts without a ship.
Drenched in the sulfur of Venus,
Its poisonous beauty,
The unyielding land,
Loss of another eternity.
On Ganymede we drowned our sorrows,
Tears tracing a frozen path,
Breathing became painful,
We were the last.
Titan spun in lazy circles,
Beckoning us with its icy fingers,
Its land a frigid art,
A cold replacement,
For our pale beauty,
Longing,
We spun in synodic spirals,
Towards the apogee.
Flares of red and white ignited the space between us,
The Sun consumed it all in hunger,
Flickers and flashes were all that remained,
A pale echo of what once was,
An asterism of broken stars.
We spun and spun and spun,
Caught in the interstellar,
Trapped in the black holes gravity,
Time and space curled around us,
A loving embrace,
We approached singularity.
Everything faded,
Silence,
The whispers of our soul,
Suspended in time,
Wrapped around one another,
You smiled,
Life glowed at your fingertips,
Another chance,
The cosmos spiraled into chaos,
We stood,
Bathed in a burst of stardust,
The burning astronauts.
…
Someone asked me what’s the thought process behind each poem, what led me there?
I never thought about writing that, mostly because, who’d read it?
But I guess in a way it does matter; it lets me understand what pictures are painted in your mind when you read the words.
When I sat down to write this piece, I was stuck. It was a blank page, and I didn’t know what to write. I had read the Cosmos by Carl Sagan, I was inspired by it and all I had was an image of stars, so many stars. I knew I had to write this down in words.
We have one home, and we manage to pick it apart so insistently that soon nothing will be left, the fact that there is nowhere else we can go is hauntingly true.
All these emotions merged into what you see now.
Words are words, we read them as we want to see them. I hope you read in my poem what you want to see.
Thank you for reading.
