Sky Gazing by Connie Jordan Green
Beneath the benign moon
our pale bodies look up
into a sky where specks
of light have traveled more
years than imagination
can grasp, look up at stars
long dead, look and wonder
that the universe’s
slow rotation inspired
Da Vinci’s drawings,
Galileo’s discoveries,
and we, mere spectators,
lose ourselves in the breadth
of a cosmos that knows
no end nor beginning,
a concept that leads us
to stare, blink, and return
to the business of sleep.
Connie Jordan Green lives on a farm in East Tennessee where she writes and gardens. She is the author of two award-winning novels for young people, The War at Home and Emmy; two poetry chapbooks, Slow Children Playing, 2007, and Regret Comes to Tea, 2011, both published by Finishing Line Press; and two poetry collections, Household Inventory, 2015 winner of the Brick Road Poetry Award, and Darwin’s Breath, published in 2018 by Iris Press. Her poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. Since 1978 she has written a weekly newspaper column for The Loudon County News Herald. She leads writing workshops and teaches writing and literature courses for Oak Ridge Institute of Continued Studies.
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