June 2024
Bio Note: A retired magazine editor, I live in Arlington, Virginia, with my husband and cat. The antique desk where I write overlooks telephone wires and maple trees. My poems have appeared widely and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. My publications include All Alive Together, Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, Personal Astronomy, When You Escape, and The Unknowable Mystery of Other People.
Out There
Where is everybody? Enrico Fermi famously asked.
Billions of stars and planets
plenty of possibly habitable zones
but no proof of life except here on Earth.
Long ago, climbing a tree, my son insisted
he saw a UFO, and even now – a schooled sceptic –
in some small corner of his mind, I suspect,
he harbors a tiny hope of extraterrestrials.
So do I – and why not?
Why should the wonder of intelligent life
be expended on a single planet?
Why should whatever creative force
made us not make others elsewhere?
Science, God, either, both –
I’d like to think life is surging out there
whether we see the results or not.
And if we never see them, maybe that’s better –
no fear, no enmity, just somewhere, somehow
a spark, an unimaginable gathering of atoms.
What Words Do
You are yourself even while being
another – Abdelfattah Kilito
We speak all the languages, but in English
You on the couch with your profusion
of Turkish and Arabic books
Me in the chair, cat in my lap, Latin grammar
at hand
How do you say grammar in Romanian, French,
Italian, Spanish …
I bring up Google Translate on the phone
then turn on my online etymology app
Sure enough, they all go back to Latin
but Turkish and Arabic are another matter
entirely
It’s just one of the ways we two are – ourselves
but with many languages, always checking
the dictionaries
Words hover between us, waiting to be
translated, waiting to be taken in by old minds
that may soon forget them
Calligrapher, writer, reader – we are what
words we make, what words make us
What's the Matter
In truth, there are only atoms and
the void – Democritus, c. 400 BC
Is that all there is? Atoms – well, elements –
and the void? What about everything else?
They tell me all the work is done under the hood
by the mass, charge, and spin of the elements.
Forgive me if I find it hard to believe the cosmos
and all that’s in it depend on what subatomic stuff
does while we’re not watching.
But never mind. I’ll take the scientists’ word
that fish and chocolate and pine trees
and all the rest result from busy work
at the atomic level.
It’s worth considering the sheer simplicity
and cleverness of it all, worth contemplating
the unseen mystery behind it.
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