Caroline Talks Back to the Poets
The poet can sing to a lone bright star,
but we astronomers look at all of them
and the shining nebulosity between.
We sweep to plot a map of every point and blur
of light, and calculate the dance of three
thousand, none quite alike. Poets, attend to
the river of milk braiding and unbraiding its hair.
There is no one love and no one
fate. We are drops in a luminosity,
a silent roar of hearts opening in the dark.
Credit:ESO/B. Tafreshi, some rights reserved
Laura Long previously lived at McDonald Observatory in far west Texas with her husband, an astronomer. In December 2013, after years of research, she published The Eye of Caroline Herschel: A Life in Poems, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. This collection includes the poems in Astropoetica and also poems nominated for a 2014 Pushcart Prize. Her first novel, Out of Peel Tree, was published in April 2014. She teaches at Lynchburg College.