Looking up into the night’s sky can be a simple but profound act. These poets, selected by The Society of Classical Poets, take us on a journey to explore the reaches of space as we know it. Is the universe beyond our comprehension? Is it intelligently designed? Does it contain some entity looking back at us? Brew a cup of tea and see what these poets have to say about these cosmic questions:
Cosmorama
By Kemar Cummings
Beyond the skies is universal eternity.
Nebulous ghosts of dust float around
In the black hole of space. A night profound
As death itself, as life in its old infancy,
Contains a trillion grains of stars inside a galaxy
Where suns (beyond the reach of sight or sound)
Flare as comets streak fire in their earthbound
Career. Their lightnings flash out of cold infinity.
Bound by deep azure Atlantic waves,
The tropical beach, Everest’s cloud-snowed peak
And the green plains of grass that richly grow,
This world where the play of silver streams laves
Cliffs is one with the cosmic dark mystique
That binds the universe in its lunar glow.
Kemar Cummings is a poet living in Australia.
Uni-verse
By Alan Nordstrom
Implicitly the Cosmos has design,
Just as I hold the pattern in my mind
Of how this sonnet’s feet and rhymes align
With where some latent motive is inclined.
One cannot see the sonnet’s form until
It’s filled with what at last grows manifest,
Expressing clearly its inherent will
Confined till then within its covert chest.
In fact just as this poem’s lines emerge,
The universe at large evolves in time
When motive, mass and energy converge
As readily as reason does with rhyme.
Consider then the universe as verse
Writ large; or this the universe, but terse.
Alan Nordstrom is a Professor of English at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida.
Turtles All the Way Down
By James Ph. Kotsybar
They operate contrary to the rules
of common sense that we hold dear as proof
that what we know is right, that we’re no fools
and senses we possess perceive the truth.
They ramble through eleven dimensions.
Their motions, seemingly governed by chance,
confuse and amend our comprehensions –
on heads of pins, probabilities dance.
The turtles supporting the world we ride
have gotten quantumly stranger today –
so small their extra dimensions can hide
beneath the larger turtles in the way.
Atop this turtle-tower, we still sit,
and, teetering, try to make sense of it.
James Ph. Kotsybar is owner of Chaotic Exotics orchid nursery in Lompoc, California.
Lightness
By Carol Lynn Grellas
Where lightness finds the passage through the dark
the thoroughfare of dimness, where we'll soar
about the sun undone, unborn again,
but one─divine the spark! The wicket door
unfastens where the constellations form
sepulchers made of stars. Celestial reach─
become what’s yet to be, your elegy
of memoirs left beneath the weeping beech
our private pain released. O spirit’s heart
no loneliness eclipsed by shadows breathes
beneath the Zodiac where night-birds sing
and crown each shining sphere with wreathes
from fronds of maidenhair in braids of gold
where rainbows arc and nights are never cold.
Skies of a Child
By Jerri Hardesty
I love to gaze into the midnight sky
To search the night for planets and bright stars,
Caress, with pointing finger, blazing Mars,
And blow a kiss to Venus passing by.
I wonder and I ponder other beings,
Perhaps now casting eyes at Milky Way,
Their far-off planet turning into day,
While Saturn hula-hoops its frosty rings.
As I look up and they look up, who knows
If somehow we could touch each other’s thought?
Imagination percolates and grows
While squinting at a distant glowing dot.
At edge of consciousness, awareness flows,
A loophole glimpse that time and space forgot.
Jerri Hardesty is a poet living in Brierfield, Alabama.
Where Does the Sky Begin or End?
By Sierra July
Where does the sky begin or end?
The sea above, the stars attend?
Burn bright, a galaxy anew
Not in the sky we see so blue
Could paint a line up to the moon
Hear melody of nighttime tune
Look up into the midnight black
Then wouldst I say I’m back on track?
Comets, stardust, fly overhead
Below, the creatures drift to bed
Meteor metal reflects light
Above, there’s not a soul in sight.
Sierra July is a poet living in Florida.
The Reverie of Space
By Julio Toro San Martin
In darkness, in the mantling of the night,
When Earth is calm, and troubling noises cease,
I turn with wonder-looking eyes, to please
My dulled senses, from the day’s untranquil sight:
And first gaze upon heavens lesser light,
The moon, who’s beams far into space, she shines;
Next to the farther planets, who’s bright lines
I trace in a trajectory of might;
And over all holds the dominion of the stars,
Numberless, in endless infinities of space,
Old, perhaps their very being is a place,
Untouched, of which we may not breach the bars;
And farther still lie worlds on worlds to chase,
And unknown caverns of eternity to trace!
