Joanna Preston

Earthrise

To feel the always coming on
The always rising of the night
—Archibald MacLeish

Tethered by a thought, as much
as by the slender umbilical
—half a metre for every year of his life—

he hangs in space above
the slow-turning planet,
tiny as a moth, orbiting

a street lamp at the end
of a deserted road—houses
guarded by ranks of sullen weeds,

snowflakes drifting through
a broken gable, shards of glass
dulling in the sodden carpet.

And everywhere the mist—
a grey tide gathering
into a silent sea,

broken only by the stanchion, its
sallow sodium glow,
the moth’s ragged circling,

and the astronaut, staring down
into the well
of cloud and weather,

the gold flash from his visor
as he bends
to take the earth’s confession.