One of the most wonderful and humbling things that can happen for me as an artist is for my work to inspire someone else’s art.
My friend Liz is a fabulously talented fiber artist. Today she surprised me with a gift of her latest design:
She even wrote a poem of her own for the back:
Things like this remind me that life is good. Friends are good. Art is good. Poetry is good.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission I has completed the scientific portion of its mission, but its cultural mission as repository for a portion of the Lunar Codex is just beginning. The lander’s payload includes The Polaris Trilogy: Poems for the Moon, which will also journey to the moon’s south polar region aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin lander in 2026.
I am deeply honored to have a poem in Volume 2 of the collection, whose theme was Stars, Sun, Moon. I share the poem here, first published in The Polaris Trilogy: Poems for the Moon (Brick Street Poetry, Inc., 2023), in hopes it will encourage you to find a copy of the book and read all the amazing poems it contains from people around the world.
Without even getting out of bed
I cannot be bored with so much
world at hand: day slides in and out
of night; stars make room for moon
who yields to sun; clouds and other shadows
play through leaves, over the counterpane.
What more awaits me when I rise?
Posted in Poetry
Tagged Blue Ghost, Firefly Aerospace, moon, moon poetry, The Polaris Trilogy
I have a poem going to the moon.
No, really: way back at the beginning of 2022, I sent a poem in response to a call from Brick Street Poetry for an international collection of original poetry to be included in the Lunar Codex, a library of contemporary creative works that will be housed in three operational sites on the moon. The Polaris Trilogy: Poems for the Moon is slated for launch with NASA’s VIPER mission to the lunar south pole in late 2024. To my immense surprise and delight, my poem was selected.
The Polaris Trilogy includes work from all seven continents (researchers stationed in Antarctica contributed several poems) and dozens of nations and languages, several of them Indigenous. Brick Street plans a series of podcasts featuring poets who wrote in a language other than English, reading their poems in the original and then in English translation. (I’m almost as excited about this as I am about the whole lunar thing – I can’t wait to hear those poets and their work!)
Lead editor Joyce Brinkman talks about the Codex and Lucy Park reads her poem from the anthology, first in Korean and then in English translation in this interview by Susanna Song for the Sejong Cultural Society. Bonus feature: learn about sijo, an ancient Korean poetic form!
Although the nickel-based microfiche edition is reserved for the lunar mission, The Polaris Trilogy is available in paperback here on earth at Amazon. Click on the sample to read the foreword by project founder Samuel Peralta and the introduction from lead editor Joyce Brinkman.
Links:
NASA’s VIPER mission: https://www.nasa.gov/viper
Susanna Song’s interview with Lucy Park and Joyce Brinkman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDK0STIKHN0
Amazon purchase page for The Polaris Trilogy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWS61PV
The Quinnipiac is one of several tidal rivers that empty into Long Island Sound through Connecticut, whose name is derived from the Algonquian and means “land of the great tidal river.”
Wolf Moon on the Quinnipiac
the moon of cold bears down
hard upon us now, veiled in ice
crystal clouds, high and thin
above the crackling earth
and the Veil itself is thin
tonight and brittle as the rimy
shelf that marks the high
water line when the tide
has drawn its briny lifeblood
seaward, cold but not so cold
as we whose souls rise
steaming into the darkness
The Daily Compost 