ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Amit Majmudar is a novelist, poet, essayist, diagnostic nuclear radiologist (M.D.) and the first poet laureate of Ohio. He writes and practices in Dublin, Ohio, where he lives with his wife, twin sons, and baby daughter.
Also by Amit Majmudar:
Godsong: A Verse Translation of the Bhagavad-Gita
Dothead
The Abundance: A Novel
Partitions: A Novel
0°, 0°
Night Sky over the Perkins Observatory, Delaware County, Ohio
The light drains out of me,
And you can see up
To the depth of me, my stars
The cave art of the cosmos.
No sun. No distraction
Shouting fire in the crowded
Heavens. Only vision
All the way through.
If you could turn off
All the chatter, kill
The senses with their ambient
Light, you’d look up
At the low domes of your skulls
And see your real vastness.
Everybody's inner night sky
Would reveal its constellations
Like a heaven scanned
From an observatory
Miles under water
With a mirror for a lens,
Its neural nebulae,
The Sirius of spirit,
The Betelgeuse of being
There inside you all along
With comets zapping
Down your axons, poems
Breaking past your mouth's
Event horizon
So that I, the night sky,
I might speak to my
Believers here tonight —
Exhorting you, as should
A God his devotees,
To turn your telescopes
To me, for when you stargaze,
I can eyegaze right back,
Down at the bottom
Of the telescopic well
Your equal, blinking human eye
That’s infinitely more
Ablaze than any hot-
For-glory Alpha Centauri,
Whose fuel and fusion comes
From hydrogen and not the heart.
You're all a night sky,
Right back at me,
No less celestial
For being earthbound.
I am dark matter,
But I am beautiful.
I am Neptune, ancient,
Nova, self-renewing;
I am God's lost name
In diamond Braille
The human hand has long
Forgotten how to feel.
Study me to learn
Exactly where you played
Before the gravity
Of earth enmired you.
This is the night sky
Calling you aloft
Not toward outer
Space but inner.
Look hard at me a while.
Can you feel the scaffolds
Tip away
To either side of you?
Stargazer, starboard lies
Your port of origin.
Five, four, three, two, one.
Liftoff.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
