Sunset in the Vastness

We're on a planet
where the wind is blowing,
far out and away from
one star burning the sky's
white feather clouds,
where nitrogen blue 
tinges yellow in the heat,
where a silver jet
burns like a meteor
thirty thousand feet up.

We're on a planet
where green waves lap
the moss-wooded bulkheads,
musty with the scent
of brine washed inland
from the Atlantic,
the liquid slap of water
sucked in between planks,
squeezed out to collide with those
still innocent of solidity.

We're on a planet
whose moon is rising,
whose ruby face climbs
from haze shivering 
in July heat
given way to August humidity.

How silent our moon,
how elegantly smooth
her climb, despite the wounds
of age-old craters.
They beckon us back,
those lifeless rims
of gray rock
and barren powder soil,

to gaze upward at the blue
white-feathered jewel 
against the black,
this planet we're on,
where the wind is blowing...

Scott Speck
08/01/2004