Retrograde
The Catholic astronomers claimed that retrograde of the planets in the night sky was an elaborate loop-de-loop motion. They made graphic representations of the celestial tracks to better explain the geocentric system their math was meant to preserve.
The math was false. No planet circles the Earth. What the difficult astronomer Galileo knew, that no one else seemed to believe was that we are on a course that no human being can change. Graphs couldn’t reverse the track our planet carried them along.
Those men tried their damndest to explain that we are the second most important thing in existence. Those men that wanted to be the center, as much as they wanted the safety of the Catholic church’s approval, went out at night to look at the stars and assign them meaning.
Galileo stood at his window under arrest, gazing at the same sky. The billion speckled lights reflected in his pupils. The lights that wouldn’t stay put within the little meaning they had been given.
South Carolina
From moment one,
you were fine
as the narrow pines.
To Charleston,
then Columbia,
then Spartanburg
You brought friends
and you brought family
like mosquitoes
to my blood-warm skin.
South Carolina,
I would have never
given you the credit,
to be the relief
from the heat.
Your breeze falling
down the hillside
to fight me, delay me.
I thought you
another state
on a long list, but
now I’m thankful
for the land
between visits.
The wind that cooled
me all the way through.
Now I’m thankful
for you, South Carolina,
my link
between friend,
family, and land.
Fine as the narrow pines,
and warm as the Sun,
on my wind-flushed cheeks.
Waterfall or Poem About Nothing on the Behalf of Carley McKee
Brown water rushes down the rocks to the lower pool.
It’s swirl and churn is visible on the surface;
the formations of circles and half-circles on the water
pull further apart as the flow picks up speed and falls yet again,
this time over a series of boulders more than ten meters tall.
The weight and momentum pours the water down upon itself
and drags deep into a second pool. White cascades
back into the dull, post-rain brown then moves toward
another fall. Twenty five meters or more down.
Mist flows off the wall as a cloud and wets the surfaces
in every direction. The water collects in a wide, shallow
pool before continuing as the river. The river that will flow
back into the ocean where it will be taken in as though
it were never a great, raging waterfall.
