Astropoetica: Spying Orion, by Megan M'Clure

Telescope Spying Orion, I focus in
          on new-born stars in the Trapezium:
                    a fifteen-hundred-year-old still
image of a cosmos where lifetimes
          are measured in gigayears. My eyes
                    are frozen, held to the eyepiece,
unable to turn away. Through a trick
          of mirrors, I invert my scope's
                    extension to the stars:

move the stars to the right.

As my fingers track controls,
          fighting the Earth
                    turning under my feet,
my fumbling is magnified
          in a blur; I reel
                    past the heavens, impaled
by the gravitational field
          of a spinning planet that now buries
                    Orion beneath my horizon.

Megan M'Clure grew up in Calgary, Canada, completed graduate studies at the University of Toronto, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in relativity and cosmology at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.