Welcome to May’s Poem of the Month!
Sometimes I could swear that the clocks in my house accelerate and there are really only 12 hours in each day… May has been a blur marked by birthday celebrations, six weeks of kitchen remodel (finally coming to a beautiful end – yeah!), weekends out of town, kid’s school activities, dinners with friends…
As I sat down the other day to start reading some poems in search of this month’s selection, I stumbled upon this month’s selection, and recalled a fond high school memory of driving out into the Alabama countryside with friends to hang out and listen to music on the car radio (there obviously wasn’t a lot to do for teenagers in my hometown). I remember piling out of the car into the hot evening air, and as my eyes began to adjust to the darkness, the stars seemed to grow in their brightness until the sky became of dome of twinkling light. The vastness made a remarkable impression on me, and standing there, slightly stunned, I mumbled a paraphrased line to myself from H.G. Well’s “Time Machine” (here faithfully reproduced): “Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.”
Hopefully this poem will provide good intellectual balance to our otherwise busy lives. Read it, and then go out tonight and take a look at the stars…
Adam Kirsch
(1976 – )
Now that no one looking at the night
Now that no one looking at the night-
Sky blanked by leakage from electric lamps
And headlights prowling through the parking lot
Could recognize the Babylonian dance
That once held every gazer; now that spoons
And scales, and swordsmen battling with beasts
Have decomposed into a few stars strewn
Illegibly across an empty space,
Maybe the old unfalsifiable
Predictions and extrapolated spheres
No longer need to be an obstacle
To hearing what it is the stars declare:
That there are things created of a size
We can’t and weren’t meant to understand,
As fish know nothing of the sun that writes
Its bright glyphs on the black waves overhead.
