Sisyphus, Birding

In  2018, I’ve decided to post one of my poems each week. This week’s poem, Sisyphus, Birding, picks up only tangentially from last week’s. It’s not sci fi, exactly, though Pluto comes into it. It’s not fantasy or mythology, exactly, either, though Sisyphus stars. (He’s the deceitful wise-ass that takes on even the Greek gods and as punishment has to keep rolling a rock uphill forever.)

It’s an odd little poem, even if I do say so. It lightly references other more famous poems, but not enough to really converse with them–more like the touch on a touch-and-go landing. Those, maybe, are only heard by me or others already deeply steeped in poetry.

Connections: Thomas, Hopkins, NASA?

Dylan Thomas’ villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night contributes the tiniest echo of his “dying of the light” in my “turning of the light”.

And while the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon (from The Windhover) does not make an appearance, birds and Hopkin-esque wordplay dance a bit through the poem.

When this poem was written, NASA was having a bit of fun with the hastag Plutotime. The agency asked people to post photos taken at a time of day in which there was as much light locally as Pluto receives at full noon. So, at Pluto’s brightest. NASA even built a calculator so you could figure out when you would receive that amount of light at your location. This was part of NASA’s outreach to promote the fantastic pics of Pluto coming from the New Horizons spacecraft in its 2015 Pluto flyby.

Like last-week’s what-if, there’s a bit of what-if here, too. What would the sunlight on Pluto look like, so far away? What if you were on Pluto? What would you miss? So far away, you could perhaps never return — it would be a permanence along the lines of Sisyphus’ permanent punishment. And if you mash together Pluto and Sisyphus’ Hades and Hopkins and Thomas…and my own quirky neurons…and then use all that as just a jumping off point, perhaps you get something like this.

Sisyphus, Birding

Neither nightingale nor lark linger.
They do not edge the turning of the light,
of which there is so little. Here,
it is always the minuscule noon of Pluto,
dim glow with neither day nor night.
Nor any other songbirds lurk
in my unpunctuated gloom.
Nor raven, nor blackbird.
Not horned owl, hummingbird, swan.
Nor any of the orders of aves.

Morose minstrels of mistiness,
mending nothing, sing endless
sullen songs of their damned hearts
as they wind along switchbacks below.
Lately I can barely hear the beat
of my own useless breath upon stone.

Sisyphus, Birding was originally published by The Woven Tale Press, Issue V, #3, April, 2017. Original notice of that publication appears here.

If you enjoyed Sisyphus, Birding, you can read more of my work on this site or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves which is available in both ebook and print.

Have a great week, and look for another poem next Monday. As always, comments welcome.