Member Poem

Her slap was the crack of a Colt,
an angry thunderbolt
knocking him off his boats.
Clad in autumn coats,
two youngsters wandered far
with this fellow and his dogs
and his chirpy monologues.
He showed them star after star
and planets: Mars and Saturn;
interpreted the pattern
of speckles called Orion.
“Like a windblown dandelion
scattering its seeds,
the heavens are breaking up,”
he told them, as each pup,
attached to matching leads,
followed the girls to a place
as mysterious as space.
With eagerness and welly
they passed the pizzeria,
Joe’s Tavern, Nelly’s deli
and ShopRite. Cassiopeia
appeared as they trod the last
illumined lane. A vast
psychedelic dome,
light years from their home,
mantled them as they came
to suburbia’s darkest quarter
where, from heaven’s pearly pendant,
Sirius looked resplendent.
He said, “Time to reclaim
the darkness. Do not cower!”
Emma sensed its power
and felt the Swan transport her
to the fuzziest constellation,
to the edge of all creation,
far from her mom, who bewailed
the absence of her daughter.
She could not have been distraughter!
For Emma fully failed
to tell her where she went
with chum and pups and gent.
So when, at length, they strode
back down their tree-lined road,
on glimpsing her glowering parent,
she knew she had been errant.
Antelope-fast she flew
toward mom who, in a stew
that could sizzle the troposphere,
as the scientist came near,
stepped quickly up, took aim,
then, like a cobra, struck—
a slap of searing flame.
He had no chance to duck.
Though the puppies licked his cheeks,
they burned for three whole weeks,
a time as far in the past
as the primal cosmic blast.
Now scarcely a star can show
through the megacity’s glow.
Yet Emma, immersed in college,
is furthering her knowledge
of world and satellite—
ghosts of a magical night.