Ad Astra

By David Falkinburg

There’s an open wound
across the sky
bleeding stars
waiting to be bandaged
with paper and ink.

Fire ashes
smoke towards it
from a tired history smoldering
wanting hope from those stars.
Have we forgotten what’s
above us?

Put down your earthen weight
and all those
retrograding problems and
worn out words and

portal into the space time
skin of the universe.
Find the infinite
mass heart
or scorching eyes
waiting to warm you.

Enter the ancient
bloodstream
orbit with
lunar blood cells violet
nebulae pumping red life
into suns.

Lift spirits,
channel brain neurons
to gamma waves,
and open your ears
to the cosmic noise

to the sound out there
of big bands still jazzing
jaunting without a care.

Walk with dark
matter across years of light
and paved particle paths
of spectrum explosions
making embers in your eyes.

You’ll get something from nothing
if you breathe in the photons
make your lungs light up
so that you can see
that in the darkness
are colors pulled across clouds
painted planets

alive with the light.
Exhale from those lungs
who’ve only known one lover’s
sigh, but who will now kiss
the mistresses of the gods
on the heels of Apollo

and become weightless
to fly through invented veins.
Old light watching us
in the corners of the universe
as we bend the bones of time.

Cut out a bolt of the celestial
sphere for your universe’s cloak
to cover your naked human skin
as humans trek into space.

Ad astra
Ad astralis corpus
Ad solaris animam
et retro
in nostro praevidimus.

(To the stars
To the astral body
To the solar soul
and back
into our solar selves)