Best Spacespace Poems
Note-- The Tulsa World Newspaper published my prose version of this in February
1999 and I wrote this version later.
Poor orphaned Pluto is out in gloom and frigid cold
Considered an outsider, his bitter sorrow unfolds
Demoted from planet status he had enjoyed for years.
He lost his brothers and sisters, amidst a flood of tears.
He will dearly miss them though thousands of miles apart.
All nine were family members with camaraderie at heart
For seventy years they claimed him as they circled round the sun
Now he’s no longer orbiting ethereal space in fun.
He asks, “Why do earthlings think they are so very smart?
You’d think they’d be aware of my spinning work of art
Just a trans-Neptunian Object with ice caps at my poles?
Astronomers will ponder when to outer space I stroll.”
A single daisy blooms beside
the spacious path I gaily tread.
I take a glance and strangely feel
attracted to its garnished head.
And so I dip into the grass
to better see the flower's face,
or could that be a heav'nly sphere,
and I a victim of its space?--
a petalled planet, so to speak:
for who's to say that what I see
is not in fact a floral orb
with floating fields of gravity?--
the force that forms its atmosphere,
compelling colored leaves to cling
around its soft pollinic core
to form its planetary ring.
Akin to Saturn, I would think,
if only for its outer shape,
but look!--a foreign drifter nears:
a bee, see how it gravitates
towards the levitating plant
as if it was an asteroid?
It's quite a grueling task, you see,
for any creature to avoid
the pull of such a pretty thing.
I too am bound, much like the bee,
by sight and sense of smell, for they
are too the toys of gravity.
It would appear that we approach
the flower's face because it's fair,
but no!--that's surely not the case;
we move because our sight's ensnared:
the very spheres we use to see
are commandeered by gravity,
and made to move as if they were
some paltry piles of space debris.
The nose, a satellite that tracks
the signals of a scented source,
is not intrigued by fragrant waves,
but solely by the flower's force!
Suppose this captivating bloom
is all I think it seems to be:
then that would mean that space is green,
and gardens nurture galaxies.