Best Observatory Poems
Outstretched are the heavens
Open infinity
Ornate spheres spin in line
Overwhelming wonders
Opalescent sparkles
Orbiting light's prime source
Organized with brilliance
4-3-2021
Pleiades O Poetry Contest
Sponsor: Kim Merryman
surrounding objects each with distinct names
dizzy and blurred.
consumating witnesses in a pair of
windshield wipers washing away the rain.
your head turned to the right slightly
looking away.
the rocks and trees lower and
draw so very close.
but you are somwhere else.
your belt buckeled form fastened
to the seat wanders down the
interstate corridor.
how you drift through the lanes
so quick and so quiet.
Is there anyone out there?
Lonely people listen to an empty sky
Waiting and hoping
Straining tired ears just to hear a single noise
They suffer nightly disappointments
Static of an earthly design
They stare for endless hours
They share a million, million thoughts
But they all ask just one question
In all of forever
In all of where ever
Separated by a trillion miles
There has to be others
Living on a blue green ball
Wondering on a cool spring night
Is there anyone asking about us?
I'm engaged with the great hover
As confusing as it, I ponder
I venerate its spry glory
When I look in the high observatory
As imagine, I see
With its plot guarantee
Winds cool, into red of elevation
For its ravenous tenants passion
All, in its stylish creation
Of stature and functional question
The high observatory grew so still,
The click of cooled machinery on the hill
Sounded like iron teeth against the stone.
The master of the lenses sat alone,
His fingers frozen on the tracking wheel,
Refusing what the numbers would reveal.
For sixty years their ledger had been grim:
A catalog of stars growing dim,
A map of dead inheritances caught
In the cold webs of wars their fathers fought.
The junior optic clerks began to weep,
Not for Vaeloria’s transition deep,
But for the heavy weights they carried home—
The gray restrictions of their own glass dome.
They looked out at their city down below,
Where soot-stained towers cast a rusted glow,
Where rations dwindled and the sirens wailed,
And every dream of green expansion failed.
"It is a trick of optics," someone said,
A senior scribe who shook his heavy head.
"A planet cannot heal its own design;
No root can straighten out a border line."
But as the silver pulse renewed its beat,
The skepticism withered in the heat
Of that far, luminous and quiet proof:
That grace could blossom through a broken roof.
By morning, the logbooks were cast away.
The watchers left their towers for the day,
Descending from the cold, peak-sheltered air
To tell the crowded streets and public square
That out beyond their world of lock and key,
A sister earth had set its citizens free.