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Ninety percent hydrogen,
and ten percent helium,
makes up the
effulgent blur spotted
high overhead on a clear, cold night.
In the observatory tower,
the moon-lit floor shifts
under the open sky through the gaping roof.
Squinted faces to the telescope end,
a graduate student tells the group of
shivering families
“This is Jupiter, and three of its
Galilean moons.”
No longer a blur but a sphere
striped in smeared reds, whites, and tans
a thumb print of orange
on the lower right.
Around it three glowing,
linear dots, one on the left,
two on the right.
A pin-prick of light
to the naked eye,
two years away
if traveling one hundred
times faster than a jetliner,
and able to hold
over one thousand
and three hundred earths
inside of it,
visible to our naked eyes.
Afterward, the walk through the
parking lot under the full moon is
an elated one. So much else
goes on while we toil,
sweat, and live our tiny lives,
on this one rain-drop of the galaxy.
A couple, slouched and gray haired
clasps hands as they walk,
so young compared to
these masses, circling the sun.
At home, a man on a science program
says that if the lifespan of the earth
as it is, had only been one year
all of human history
would have taken place
during the last ten seconds.
Star-light floods in from the windows,
the death of those stars
creating the atoms
that make up our bodies.
A man on the radio sings with a guitar,
“Can’t believe,
how strange it is
to be anything at all.”
