| Posted on Apr 03, 2012 05:42:29 PM | Don Pettit | 10 Comments | |
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Seeing as how April is National Poetry Month….
Space is My Mistress
Space is my Mistress,
and she beckons my return.
Since our departure I think of you
and yearn to fly across the heavens arm in arm.
I marvel at your figure,
defined by the edges of continents.
You gaze at me with turquoise eyes,
perhaps mistaken for ocean atolls.
You tease me to fall into your bosom,
sculptured by tectonic rifts,
only to move away as if playing some tantalizing game.
Time and time we turn together,
through day, and night, and day,
repeating encounters every 90 minutes with a freshness,
as if we have never seen our faces before.
We stroll outside together,
enveloped by naked cosmos,
filled with desire to be one.
So close,
you sense my every breath,
which masks your stare through visor haze.
We dance on the swirls of cloud tops,
while skirting the islands of blue.
You know my heart beats fast for you.
Oh, Space is my mistress,
and when our orbits coincide,
we will once again make streaks of aurora across the sky.
Don's blog also appears at airspacemag.com.
Tags : astronauts, earth observation, exploration, international space station
Thank you for sharing the photos, your lovely poetry, your thoughts and the science of it all. What a gift you've given us!
Don Pettit is my kind of guy!! No one else brings his kind of flair for storytelling into orbit! The man is a treasure!! :)
Don, you are unquestionably the poet laureate of space!! an absolutely lovely & moving poem -(... terrific b-day surprise for me). Thanks. t
The poet soul of the engineer. Not a myth, but a reality.
Very nice poem and that image is just magnificent! You guys have the best job on Earth! (or off Earth or... never mind...)
Any chance at all we could see a larger version of that picture? (the 5-year old within him asked eagerly...)
Cheers!
Great poem! Thank you. I have written one inspired by Helix Nebula NGC 7293. Wish I could share it with you, but I don't want to post it here.
fascinating don.
regards.
Beautiful words, Don. They said they should send a poet to outer space. Well, it looks like they already have.
very beautiful <3
very very very very beautiful , greetings from the land of Arabia :)