a space poem

In the silence, a voice – the unheard sound

a ship’s rockets create as they cry out

against the void. In the vacuum, a wind,

like fingers trailing down a spine, shifts

from star to star, touches the point

where dreams become and thoughts –

the eddy of  time – flow back and forth, pool

in the emptiness of comparisons; really

is any star better than the previous, greater

than the nova or less than the yellow sun’s

emerging experience of the night?

And in this darkness we travel around and around

and through, a line without intention voyaging

to places so distant that by the time we reach them

the reasons no longer matter, like how a starman

can hold a child, a daughter, say, tiny legs kicking,

and, with all the promises whispered

into the powerful scent of that  newborn crown,

still be shocked when she leaves home…

as if the years were but short breaths

between the joys and errors of life, and the starman

finds himself in the spaceship, his face pressed

against the small porthole watching

his daughter, like a bright blue planet, fading
into the diminishing distance of existence.