Suspended in a Sunbeam (a poem)

(This is the final piece I wrote for my high school's online literary magazine, The Inkblot, in my Honors Creative Writing II class. I thoroughly enjoyed my time in this class and had the opportunity to challenge myself to write about things I wouldn't normally write about and approach my ideas from all kinds of different perspectives. The theme for our final issue of the semester was "space", and I chose to write a poem about the Voyager missions launched by NASA in 1977. NASA sent two probes into space, each carrying a golden record with sounds and songs selected by Carl Sagan along with 116 images of life on Earth. I hoped for the piece to be a poetic exploration of this small attempt to sum up human existence and the necessity that we feel to communicate that existence with extraterrestrial life. So, here it is, the last creative piece I will ever write at Green Hope High School.)


The dictionary defines a voyage

as a long trip to a faraway land,

and a voyager

as the one who embarks, who travels,

who wanders.

Historically, an explorer.

One who navigates the unknown.

An adventurer.

In 1977

NASA sent the Voyager I and II probes

into space.

Because they would be the first spacecrafts

to travel beyond our Solar System,

a panel of scientists composed golden records carrying

messages for potential extraterrestrial life.

The records are a time capsule

of human existence,

and include photos of canyons,

skyscrapers, Olympic sprinters,

cells, diagrams of the makeup of Earth.

Songs representing different styles of music

and greetings in fifty-five languages.

The records will likely outlast all of human life

and possibly even the Blue Planet itself.

They will remain, navigating the great cosmic ocean

for millions of years.

I wonder if one can really be a voyager if

their destination is unknown.

It’s hard not to feel extremely small

thinking about those spacecrafts, hurtling through

the final frontier

at 35,000 miles a second.

We’re trying to talk to aliens but we haven’t

even finished charting our own oceans.

I looked up at the sky last night

when I took my dog out

and thought

about those records and the

fruitlessness of this existence--

my life, a microscopic blip on this

great blinking timeline.

There are potentially

134 habitable planets within thirty four

light years of us, but it takes

the Voyager crafts 17,000 years

to travel just

one single light year.

I find this extremely frustrating.

It will be 40,000 years before the crafts get anywhere

near another star other than our Sun

and I’ll be gone and everyone I’ve ever known and loved

will be gone and there might have been wars

and there might have been love and happiness

and new things that none of us right now could even imagine,

and maybe aliens will find those records and Earth will look

absolutely nothing like what it does in those 116 humble images.

All those airports and busy highways,

mountain climbers, cotton harvests.

Little university towns, computers.

Superficial wounds on our fresh-faced planet.

So here I am, driving in my car,

singing along to good music and here

I am going to the movies and going to concerts

and here I am worrying about college and my friends

and the rest of my tiny life and there are probably

other life forms out there and we’re probably not

alone and everything I am doing will never be

anywhere close to significant.

As of this moment, Voyager I is 20,073,807,603 KM from Earth

and I’m thinking about what cereal I want to

have for breakfast tomorrow morning.

I guess it’s hard not to feel like

a waste of time and space when you

know you’d never make it on a golden record.

I’m writing hasty poems in class

and learning about United States government and we’re

trying to communicate with aliens who are

too far away

for me to even fathom.

Those records,

that small attempt to sum up

human existence,

that sad little encapsulation of everything we hold near and dear

to our mortal hearts,

pays tribute to our need, our desperation to

communicate everything with others.

“Tell me about your day.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I want to hear all about it.”

“I love you.”

“Let me know how it goes.”

Most are familiar with Pale Blue Dot,

the image of Earth that the Voyager sent back to us

before exiting our Solar System

forever.

There we are, a tiny little smudge,

a nearly indistinguishable blob of pixelated blue

suspended in a sunbeam.

That’s home. That’s you and me

and everything else and seven billion

other people and all of our mostly

uncharted oceans and every single blade of grass.

None of us know what will happen next,

but we sent spacecrafts outside of our

Solar System,

outside of the heliosphere,

outside of anything we’ve ever known

just for the chance to say

“Greetings

to our friends in the stars.

We wish that we will meet you someday.”

All along I knew Earth was a romantic.

Election Year (a poem)

I realize I am always measuring my life in some
nostalgic version of 

“this time last year." 

Saving chopstick wrappers 

and cards and pictures on my phone.

Trying to hold onto everything 

while I still can,

trying to salvage the unsalvagable.

Believing this moment is more 

than just simply a moment.

Thinking about all the 

cool and profound things I want to do

but never getting around to them.

They don’t make memories like this
anymore.

This will be a good month.

And this will be a good life.

May came with a blue-gray streak of 

storm threatening the tree-line,

announcing its arrival with the 

roll of thunder, darkening suburbia.

There’s something that’s always 

been bittersweet to me about this time of year.

Friends leaving, friends coming home,

Mother’s Day, flowers, 

something sleepy and fleeting.

Prom, parties, 

everything, futures, wide and bright.

May breeds a place, a time for roots, a dark dampened ground.

Looking out the window I thought about how the trees 

outside my Gov classroom have 

been there for the past

four years, too,

but unlike me, they’ll never leave.

A kind of grounded impermanence, 

a kind of stationary necessity.

We’ve been working so hard

for the day that 

we’ll get out of this place since

the day that we arrived

without noticing the trees 

or the coffee smell of the hallways.

A post-grad curse. 

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself.

Maybe I’m wrong and 

you’re not all as sentimental as I am.

Soon the tassels will turn.

We’ll move on.

This won’t matter so much.

I know it’s supposed to be a happy ending,

but is any ending every really happy?

I’ll probably miss

this the suburban safe haven
where fights don’t break out on metros 

and there’s no symbolic city grime

or museums full of weirdos 

and the distance between me and home 

is only a couple of

tiny miles.

And I know I have to get out of this town,

but part of me--

the wimpy part--

wants everything to last forever.

But there’s the necessity to leave 

this little comfort zone.

To feel nothing during the metro fight 

and to walk through museums 

with people I hardly know.

Because I made it. We made it.

Of course,

like any ending, there are

friends I made too late,

people I wish I’d known longer,

things I wish had happened.

The destinations of yesterday 

lost and forgotten as

we beat on, 

seniors singing songs for tomorrow.

But we’re just so young,

there’s still so much time 

to celebrate birthdays 

and to make the world we want

out of ourselves.

At that, there’s still enough time

to tell all your friends 

that you love them

and there’s always going to be
enough time 

for one more song.

And so we hope for tomorrow

and lament the loss of 

those who won’t make it to then

and laugh our last laughs

and tell random people how in love we are 

and then forget about it the next day

and face the future with big, beating hearts

because we’re ready.

We stand here,
facing a world
of silver spoons and soap boxes,
and we're ready. 

“Stop waiting for the right time,”

I say to myself as the sky breaks open 

and the rain starts to come down in great chutes.

“It doesn’t exist.”

For now I’ll keep writing essays about everything bagels

and listening to storms passing quietly in the night.

I'll keep saving chopstick wrappers 

and feeling sentimental and I'll believe in 

my youthful invincibility,

because maybe my art won’t get me to Jupiter,

but my lust for life could get me 

pretty darn close.