That Day at the Hayden Planetarium

When Coco met the astronaut she spontaneously wept
shaking his hand while
shaking her head,

perplexed by this welling of emotion.

He had been far. He had been strapped to a rocket and
ridden an explosion to a place so far
and so high, he said, that

it was like a giant had grabbed his chest
and yanked him into the air.

Once they thought a picture of the earth taken
from space would be so profound,
such undeniable proof of a

small place in a vast emptiness
that would know a shared
humanity, and we didn't.

We went on like before, teeming and burning
and warring, but
but

but

there is still something about a man who
has seen the earth's curve
against the blackness of everything else,

the endless frozen ocean of it,

that can inspire a few years
of awe.