Conjunction/Winter Solstice
Jupiter catty corner Saturn
passing by seeing through.
Two far-away lights
in a December sky
During a pandemic
With record death.
We’re masked up passing each other
Afraid to collide or catch
a human exhalation.
In the Southwest sky on
Winter solstice, the two planets
visible, closest since 1623.
Last time they nearly touched,
in 1226 before telescopes, cameras
or computers. Hundreds of millions
of miles apart. These two appear as neighbors
keeping an eye on one another
in the vastness of space.
We tumble here on Earth.
Distraught by isolation.
It feels like a fifth-of-a-diameter of the full moon,
separated like Jupiter and Saturn.
Distance, proximity unraveling in our universe.
Of fault and fear. Look up. Carefully.
Two tiny distant lights, in communion.
Strategically they confer.
[originally published in “Walt’s Corner” on Long Island.]
Cheryl J. Fish is a poet, fiction writer and environmental humanities scholar. Her debut novel, Off the Yoga Mat, was published by Livingston Press/UWA in Oct. 2022. She is the author of The Sauna Is Full of Maids, poems and photographs celebrating Finnish sauna culture, travel, and friendships, and Crater & Tower, poems reflecting on trauma and ecology after the Mount St. Helens Volcanic eruption and the terrorist attack of 9/11. Fish has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, and is a co-editor with Farah Griffin of A Stranger In the Village: Two Centuries Of African-American Travel Literature and she is the author of the study Black and White Women’s Travel Narratives. Fish’s poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Maintenant, Terrain, Mom Egg Review, New American Writing, Reed, Postcard poems, Santa Monica Review, About Place Journal, ISLE and Poetics for the More-than-Human-World. Her short fiction has appeared in Cheap Pop, Iron Horse Literary Review, Liars League, Spank the Carp, Boog City, and KGB Bar Lit. She is a creative writing editor of the journal Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, professor of English at BMCC/City University of New York, and docent lecturer at University of Helsinki.