Friday night with big hairy men
they could be riding Harleys
some wear bandanas as they peer through
large community college telescopes
wide silver cylinders pointed up to dotted dark
between bites of steak and cheese
they ask if I want to see Saturn
she’s clear tonight
they say like sailors looking at the moon
like Saturn sings opera
I sniff the air for beer or pot, but only smell
their sandwiches mixed with May night
they do this every Friday, search the sky
for celestial bodies, for heaven
from earth I join their shabbat
the ring, I see it, planet nestled within
I forget to breathe, then remember
that I too exist
Tag: The Universe
Moroccan Sahara
In the backseat, we must be going 80 mph, reverberating Berber music like Salat, ritualistic Islamic prayer with drums, voices, sintir strings plucked, boom from the old Peugeot’s speakers, permanent Sahara hair dryer heat fills my nostrils. We left Merzouga earlier in the morning, before that, the Atlas Mountains, Azrou, Fez, Tangier. The road is gone, only sand, like after the first inches of snow have fallen. We stop at the edge, no billboards, no little tourist kiosk, nothing, only a thousand miles of granular fragments, beaten down quartz, dolomite, calcite, sand pixels. I touch its wildness, primitive, uncontainable, not a Tonka truck home, not the domesticated box from my childhood backyard, it looms, immense with dry waves of undulating silence. We walk into it alone, like swimming past the ocean breakers, together, apart. Speechless, it has absorbed our words, sun pulsating, the desert almost asking us to quietly join it, forever. Human shadows elongate, planet rotates, heat ebbs, darkness, then stars. They appear first one by one, little white births, souls of the night sky. Then a torrent, a blanket of speckled light, countless orbs above, total blackness below. I think of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust, children who died. Never thought much about heaven before, alone, surrounded.
Daniel W. Polk 