Homage to the astrophysicist Roger Angel
The green of arctic water pales as the icebergs melt.
Forest air, snarled in the combs of urban skylines,
turns oily and gray.
Shorelines sigh as they drown.
The sky shimmers through rising water like hammered steel.
Storms surprise themselves,
still muscled far beyond their stomping grounds.
And everything is warmer than when I was a girl.
But there are geniuses among us,
minds fizzing with all manner of invention,
who mean to find a way back.
We’ll make a mirror 2000 miles across,
this one decides.
Shoot it into orbit one magnetized plate at a time
to convene in a silver sheet
that will reflect enough sunlight
to cool us off again.
I’d like to be relieved, to sleep well in my too-hot bed,
but I wonder how smart that silver is,
how sure any earthbound genius can hope to be
about any such thing,
given all that space up there,
given all that distance,
given the possibility that a mirror big enough
to touch the Atlantic at one end and the Rockies at the other
might happen to face not out toward the edges
of the universe, its face ablaze with sun,
but toward the earth instead,
a shifting canvas of blue and green,
the black of its own shadow,
and all our faces, looking up,
searching for the blue of the once-sky,
the stars of the once-night,
the endlessness I once saw
when I was a girl.
—
Lauren Wolk is best known for her novels, including the New York Times bestselling and Newbery Honor-winning Wolf Hollow, the Scott O’Dell Award-winning Beyond the Bright Sea, Echo Mountain, My Own Lightning, and Candle Island. She anticipates the upcoming publication of two picture books as well. Wolk is an award-winning poet, magazine writer, educator, and visual artist represented by the Larkin Gallery (Harwich Port and Provincetown, MA). She lives on Cape Cod.
