How funny and strange are the things that stir human emotion
Struggling to love the voices beside us, each pitching tone is a knife to each others ears
And we grow tired of the patterns of hands we hold
I think whatever we are made of,
Still reaches for its brothers
Do your eyes remember crying as another star bled red
Into an absence of light on the expanse of empty universe
The slow loss of your sister star with blue giggle teeth when she was young
Does your spine still remembers being held
Gently floating in the nebulous clouds
I wonder if the women poets left behind ever laid on their backs
And cried at the freckled stars
Remembering when they too were the little glints of light we sing to
I know a poet missing the soft gaze of Cassini
Snapping their hands out and reaching for gone air
As if all the space between them was just slipping away
But if they grasped just desperately enough, if they loved and poured poetry into the sky
Could clench the grains of space dust and dig them into their skin
But Cassini was never a star
Never formed in millions and millions of degrees celsius
Pressure pushing in and around and out of the burning hydrogen
Until it could form in just the right pretty
The right kind of burning fierce and kind guidance
Cassini was never bigger than us
Just metal perfectly fit and tightened into metal
Our hearts are too small for the swell of Jupiter
And our skin too thin for the rains of Venus
But we let Cassini go, the butterfly fluttering between a child’s curious hands
Cassini was never bigger than us
When it crashed into rings of stone, bands of floating colors
More than two hundred and fifty scientist’s souls
Falling into a halo and slowly spreading into the mist of space
Cassini-Huygens were two men with kindly hands
Spreading across the space between Earth and night sky
Dedicated to @humaintain for their birthday and also in honor of her PUBLISHED BOOK CONTACT LIGHT: the void inside and out with space and human nature written in beautiful poetry