So in thinking, I do think a lot about land and place
and how we're connected to where we live.
This next one thinks about that in a really big sense.
I think that can extend all the way out
into the universe beyond us.
So that's where we're going in this one.
So this is Sermon on the Heavens.
If you let it, the moon will tell you your smallness.
Fragile creature on a tilted planet
facing the open darkness, while the sun burns on
beyond your sight.
We have so long now denied that we
think we are the center, the Copernican sun firmly anchored
in the sky we swing through.
But I write to you as one who knows her own heart.
So I say, blessed is the wild distance
of the night, the gauzy light of nebulas reaching us
long after they're gone.
Blessed are the asteroids, those fragments of the beginning,
which we did not create.
Blessed the spacecraft that goes to bring a piece back to us,
the origin of oceans inscribed in its dust.
Blessed to those machines that go without thought of return,
the glimpses they send back of worlds we thought we knew.
Opalescent whorls of storms churn on Jupiter.
Liquid pools deep beneath the South Pole of Mars.
Faintest sunlight kindles Pluto's peaks of ice
bright as sacred flame.
Blessed all the universe beyond us,
and we who hunger and thirst to know it,
shadowed on earth, calculating the trajectories of light.