I saw
the Milky Way,
a shimmering white
band of light
against a blue-black sky─
where is it now,
that brush
of God’s hand,
our nights eclipsed
by highway lights,
dimmed by urban
dazzle?
Where are
meteors
streaking silver,
blue & white,
our nights
eclipsed
by progress’s
irreverent
gambol?
Where are
the constellations
that guided
double-hulled
Hokule’a,
from Hawaii
to Tahiti using
ancient
sky charts?
What now for
a Navaho storyteller,
recounting trickster
Coyote’s impatience,
how he flung
First Woman’s jewels
skyward
to become
bear, dipper,
Dilyéhé,
the seven sisters?
How First Woman
wept as her gems
fly skyward—
as nights now,
my eyes lifting
to a
trespassed
sky, I too
could cry.
—
Suellen Wedmore, Poet Laureate Emerita for the seaside town of Rockport, Massachusetts, has been awarded first place in Writer’s Digest’s Rhyming and Non-Rhyming Poem Contests. Her full-length book A Fixed White Light was published by Down East Books and four of her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
