Looking up at the sky, I remember Earth
doesn’t stand still, calm and reassuring,
a garden in Abinger Hammer, with afternoon
tea and hedgerows, and bees foraging.
Remember the time at Six Flags over Georgia
Momo the Monster’s cars spun
in the opposite direction from the ride itself,
and I feared my six-year-old, in her blue
overalls, and I would fly off into space.
Now another comet has invaded our solar
system; Borisov is heading towards its heart.
In a hundred years, the sea will crest
a yard higher, and a dozen islands disappear.
A group of swans is called a lamentation.
The stars—indifferent—masquerade as friends.
Then again, last summer in Maine,
you played with the twins in the waves,
and our son, in his mid-forties now,
did perfect handstands on the beach.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 26, Issue 5.
Elizabeth Coleman is the editor of Here: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), and the author of two poetry collections: Proof (Spuyten Duyvil Press 2012), a University of Wisconsin Press prizes finalist, and The Fifth Generation (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as three chapbooks (including Autumn in a Solitary Time, The Hudson Valley, 2020 [Audience Askew, November 2023], a collaboration with photographer, Michael Craig Palmer). She translated into French Lee Slonimsky’s sonnet collection, Pythagoras in Love/Pythagore, Amoureux (Folded Word Press, 2016). Her new collection was a finalist for the 2022 Cider Press Editors’ Book Prize and the 2023 Marsh Hawk Press Prize, and a quarter finalist for the 2023 Able Muse Press Prize. Several of her poems are Pushcart Prize nominees. For many years, she was a public interest attorney, and received an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2012. She lives in New York City, and in the Catskill Forest Preserve with her husband, a civil rights attorney.
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