From the Deck of the New Horizons

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.

Photo by NASA
/ Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
/ Southwest Research Institute