February 2022
Bio Note: By way of introduction: I’m a poet named Marilyn L. Taylor, I live in a ridiculously frigid place called Madison. Wisconsin, and I have a brand new book out, titled Outside the Frame: New and Selected Poems. I’d be very gratified if you’d check it out at my website: www.mltpoet.com/books. Meanwhile: the following poem was inspired by my long-held childhood ambition to become an astronomer, which was never fulfilled. (I found out that regular reading of Astronomy magazine wouldn’t be quite enough to qualify me.) But it’s probably just as well, because I’d probably have wound up writing things like this, rather than scholarly tracts on cosmology.
The Odalisques
Images beamed to Earth from space have
revealed that the moons of Uranus feature
topographical oddities both baffling
and bizarre.
—Astronomy Magazine, December 6, 2016
Here they come, the tiny tattered moons
of Uranus, their fluttering black chaddors
still shrouding them, from the farthest rooms
of interplanetary space. The scars
of ancient fires are frozen on their faces,
faces ravaged by the labyrinth
of ragged rings and elemental gases
reeling about their icebound planet-prince.
Delivered now from their hermetic cells.
these elfin freaks—wounded and mortified—
permit us to draw back their heavy veils,
hear their frenzied whispers from the void.
©2022 Marilyn Taylor
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL