Athens, Georgia
February 7, 2016
I have been here before, swept
to the stars by an artist’s rendition
bound in my childhood Book
of Knowledge. Lost in the pages
on Pluto, I stood on a cracked
and frozen plain where Sol is
but the brightest star whose light
is hours old. From eternal
twilight I turned my back
to the sun-bathed Earth, seared
by the ancient, wandering call,
set off to inhabit infinity.
-
On a farther end of forever
I find myself as in a dream
sailing shotgun on a spacecraft
the size of a grand piano
at the climax of a nine-year fling
approaching the double-dwarf
planetoid world which waltzes
with Charon face to face
on a multi-century solar swing
in two/three time with Neptune.
-
I fly by the moons of Hydra and Styx
the realm of Kerberos and Nix
dodging the darkened pole of Charon
covered with cryo-geyser debris
I shoot past the methane plains of Pluto
over the frozen Sputnik Planum
above the Virgil Fossa Canyon
land where ice volcanos flow.
I see a strangely familiar world —
a touch of haze in the light blue sky
as warm days climb to fifty-three Kelvin
across the fields of crystallized nitrogen
mountains of ice as high as the Rockies
dusted with hydrocarbon snow.
-
I have been here before, swept
aloft to far-off worlds. Now
I gaze behind to a sun-bathed
youth lost in a dream that could
never come close to riding
the deck of the New Horizons
Pluto in the rear-view mirror
universe ahead.
universe ahead.
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| Photo by NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute |
