StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. VI

An extraordinary universe lies before us,
Filled with incredible marvels and endless opportunity;
We shall either set sail from our blue home or surely we will die,
A transient race on a backwater planet, who retreated
To the secure confines of its lush green world rather than chance
The impreciseness of destiny and the possibility of losing.

A sky of cosmic spectacle
Splattered with bright colored nebulae
And galaxies as far as hubble can see;
A heaven dotted with worlds like earth,

Each one playing out
Its personal tragedies, triumphs and failures,
Each one struggling to step across the shoreline
Into eternity and the stars  above.

Let's count the decades, one by one,
Down to the end of this current run:
Six for my Grandfather, alert and able,
Five for my grandmothers, both strong to the end,
Four for my aunts who all aged gracefully,
Three for my mother who struggled against Alzheimer's.
Two for my ancestors who lived long and prospered,
One for my father who smoked and drank heavily,
And all of them for the poet, not yet one for the ages.

Watching the airplanes landing at National,
Standing on the Pentagon bus platform,
Clocking the separation between the intervals,
Forty-five, sixty, seventy-five seconds.

Comparing the aircraft to the seagulls overhead
Searching for safe haven by nightfall,
The birds eat free, the airlines charge,
Either chief leaves something to be desired.

Six A. M. on a January morning,
An hour before sunrise, cold and cloud covered;
Joggers pass by, all male and self-focused,
Singing to themselves, evaluating my body.

A businessman here, a government type there,
A retired homeowner out exercising his dog;
Somewhere on these streets, a mugger lurks,
Patrolling the walkways, searching for women.

I check each face, not walking close,
Sometimes moving to the center of the road;
An elderly gentleman quietly smiles hello,
A workman starts the engine of his automobile.

Familiar faces among the unknown
That watch me wait as I stand for my bus,
Projecting non-chalance and competence,
My pulse as steady as any woman's.

The earth moves for unmysterious reasons
But reasons that take longer than the human attention span;
While our ancient history is but a handful of millennia old
And Caesar, a character in a play by William Shakespeare,
The dinosaurs have been gone for sixty-five million years,
Our planet and our sun have existed over four billion years,
The universe around us exceeds thirteen billion,
Our written memory, at best, is only five thousand,
And a two hundred year old earthquake is a blip in the world's history
But six generations distant for mankind: the threat is unreal
For a transient, migrating ape struggling to survive..

In the beginning, when the first galaxies formed,
The moment of creation was already a distant memory;
Five hundred million years after The Big Bang banged on,
The earliest, most distant galaxies gave light
To a universe still closely spaced and timed.

The rumble of hydrogen and the dark come down,
For the great nothing had existed far long enough;
The suns, the planets, even life itself demanded,
After a proper interval of violence and confusion,
Their bright, unscripted moments of eternity.

We now have the tools to view our distant, ancient past,
And soon we will see the very end days of the beginning,
When the young continuum stuttered stepped, expanded,
Amid a swirl of infinite potential and unremitting possibility,
To birth the everlasting seed that now stretches out before us.

Above the walkway that bridges
The eighth corridor to the Pentagon Library
-- Rosslyn in the distance, caressing the river --
The planes from National slide past.

A brown haze shades the horizon,
Spoiling the otherwise mid-colbalt sky;
The weather pushes in from southern climes,
Warming the Washington afternoon.

Tomorrow the rains will arrive,
Late evening or early next morning:
A day of rain and cooler temps,
Perhaps a touch of moist light snow.

Weeping, the chaos,
For all the roads not chosen;
The impossibility of tasting everthing,
Knowing this dance must end;
The eternity of choice once given
And the inevitability of mistake.
The only perfection is the last perfection
And, when my oxygen deprived brain
Shuts down synapse by synapse
And the universe comes full stop
For my feeble, scribbling pen,
My last thought will be not enough.
Not enough, not enough,
Not ever enough.

The Moon
The Pleiades
Night half gone
I wait alone

Note 1.  The indeterminate spatial relationship of {moon} to {Pleiades} suggests the poet writes of a specific night where the moon set before the Pleiades (compare Pleiades and Orion).  Alternately the juxaposition of {moon} and {Pleiades} may be arbitrary or inherently structural (see Sapphic meter.  Also, for comparison, see Thompsonic metrics.).  Although the assumption is the moon in question is full, there is no textural indication of the actual lunar phase or the poet's intention.  

Note 2.  The {Night half gone} suggests a night where sleep has not come easily.  Some readings arbitrarily assign a time of three a. m.; others that the muse spoke while the poet was congested and her sleep erratic.  The poet herself gives no indication of compositional chronology.

Note 3.  Critical debate is unsettled whether {alone} need actually appear or if aloneness is implicit in the singular personal pronoun {I}.

Note 4.  The spatial distance between {half gone} and {wait} suggests that timeflow within the continuum has slowed perceptibly, at least for the poet.  Seconds have become minutes, minutes hours and days.  It is doubtful, however, that the poet witnessed an actual disruption of space-time, even less so, a temporal distortion.

Note 5.  General Comments.  The relationship between Sappho and Starpoet is well known.  Other than the Sicilian Connection (see Archimedes, also Sappho's visit to Syracusa) no direct genetic link has been established.  The poet herself has suggested, however seriously, that in the immensity of time and space, and given a large enough human population density, the constant random arrangement of atoms and molecules could reproduce a genotype with a similar assemblage of artistic skills and interests pursuing a parallel course of poetic inquiry.

Others believe there must be a direct ancestoral genetic connection.  There is, of course, no proof or disproof of this belief.

A few chalk it all off to coincidence, a scattered handful, to reincarnation or other theo-mystical explanations.

Still others believe the poet is obsessed with an unlikely and unprovable improbability.

The poet herself is reluctant to pursue further public discussion of this subject and is now silent.  She has still occasionally been heard, however, to mutter a frustrated "Mother!" in the middle of the night when she would prefer to be sleeping.

Sappho, as always, defers all comment.