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Dear Reader, this year I allowed the beginning of a head cold, the light rain, and the last year's political nightmare to dissuade me from getting on the bus. I'm not proud of this. Later, I realized if I had made plans with a group of friends (who were meeting up before the march) it would have catapulted me out of my funk --- so I will remember that for next year.
Instead, I told myself I had to make really good use of the day --- beyond grading papers and doing laundry (both of which I am now behind on). I worked on poems, sent out a packet of poems for submission, and then I wrote a letter to someone whom I had been wanting to write for over a year. Something about the day gave me that "now or never" push to ask for what I really want from this world. And even if my letter remains unanswered, or isn't answered as I hope for, I've done the hard work of putting into the universe what I want. Please wish me luck and I promise to report back.
In the meantime here is a poem by the poet who has most inspired me to write and to live well.
Planetarium
Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750—1848)
astronomer, sister of William; and others.
A
woman in the shape of a monster
a
monster in the shape of a woman
the
skies are full of them
a
woman ‘in the snow
among
the Clocks and instruments
or
measuring the ground with poles’
in her
98 years to discover
8
comets
she
whom the moon ruled
like
us
levitating
into the night sky
riding
the polished lenses
Galaxies
of women, there
doing
penance for impetuousness
ribs
chilled
in
those spaces of the mind
An
eye,
‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’
from the mad webs of Uranusborg
encountering
the NOVA
every
impulse of light exploding
from
the core
as
life flies out of us
Tycho whispering at last
‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’
What
we see, we see
and
seeing is changing
to continue reading this poem by Adrienne Rich
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