The Fall
The Fall
by Ankur Shrivastava
It wasn’t that your beauty was lost on me
though you were full of craters, and
bubble-wrapped astronauts were diligently scarring you
with angry fire-engines and cold-hearted rovers.
Nor had your radiant aura diminished
when an obscure telescope-yielding scientist
theorized that you were 200 million years too young,
yet perhaps well past your cosmic prime.
Your warmth was intact even when
they found steely ice dispersed on your poles.
And I hadn’t deemed you lifeless
despite them unceremoniously dropping you
for seven hundred and six strangers.
In the end it was merely the discipline,
the monotony of traversing a lonely elliptical orbit
for eons. Your idyllic, single-faced utopia,
unaware of the dark side, was simply
a disconcerting mirror.
This poem works in many ways. First of all, it’s not too short (and probably not too long either though i’m only an expert on critiquing brevity and not long-windedness since i am a rant poet).
Title indicates fall from grace (not autumn i’m guessing editor posted pic of seasonal trees to not give idea of poem away; or else they were on the bong that day. lol)and begins with ‘space theme’ and use of ‘your’ and ‘you’. So right off the bat i’m thinking that we’re talking about a person, possible lover, and not a thing especially when the poet uses ‘beauty’ and ‘cold-hearted’. But the more i read i find that the piece is indeed about a heavenly body the kind we find in space and not a lover; it appears the poet has such an emotional involvement with the ‘heavenly body’ that they think of it as human.–so we go from space metaphor describing a human in scientific terms to personification of a thing in human terms. Way to keep the reader guessing! Enthralling!
But towards the end of the poem it seems as if the author may come to grips, to wake out of the comparison by seeing themself in the object of their fascination. Did the poet see a past lover and their relationship within the statistics of this moon/comet/plantet thing? You decide.
thx for sharing!