Off-Topic

by Barton Paul Levenson

I yield to no one in my love for astronomy.
Not Copernicus standing for hours to observe
The flight of planets.

Not Kepler waiting on cold roofs at night.
Not Galileo peering through his tiny telescope,
Nor Kuiper watching comets.

Though pinned disabled to a daytime schedule
I, too, have wandered among planets,
And sailed star-seas.

Felt the beauty of the vision,
Nebulae glowing in red of hydrogen,
Green of oxygen.

Dole’s water-world, swept by enormous tides twice daily,
Raised by its gas-giant, tide-locking primary.
Theoretical planet.

Sagan’s star made of diamond, his greenhouse Venus,
Bok and Bok’s starwheel, the great Milky Way
I, too, have seen at distance.

But Copernicus sang hymns and prayed at vespers.
Kepler cast horoscopes; wrote of dream travels.
Sagan did politics.

Astronomy studies the Universe, and
Nihil humanum me alienum puto.
This, too, is astronomy.
This world, the astronomers’ world.

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