The service was an hour long and everyone (including schools of dentistry, nursing, and pharmacy) was invited to submit poems, reflections, or artwork. I wrote a poem for the occasion. This is a poem about departure.
-
Orison
The nicest receptions are the awkward ones
before the most serious of ceremonies.
This, in particular, was the immortal congregation
where Pluto was to be excommunicated
from this celestial council.
We never really noticed him, the other planets whispered.
but he didn’t say anything.
Wasn’t he just a rock too cold to socialize?
Too weak to fight off the pitchfork physicists
seeking to dethrone and tame him?
Holding a plate of pomegranate and the stem of a flute,
I gaze at the portrait of Pluto, looking past the icy exterior
and poorly defined surface details. For wasn’t Pluto
also sometimes a dog? Sometimes a God?
Sometimes an element found in nuclear bombs.
Is losing your planethood really losing everything?
I ask.
You catch me malingering into the night,
fabricating stories of this man whose exterior we have
only begun to know, whose interior we have only
begun to infer.
He leaves tomorrow for a light year cruise,
ironic because he was once the gatekeeper for the place he’s going.
Now he cannot wait to cloister himself with Persephone,
and in front of the gathered planets, he recites a poem:
Run, star princess, run with me,
satchel in hand, let us go to the sea,
stare upon the waves, those starry starry waves
that, moonlit coerced, reflect those graves
so wet with temptation, that in the gloomy dusk
we shell out the cocoon, shed the husk.
You look into the water, rippled and pine
as I trace your image, finger running a line
that parts the sea, so walk with me
out of those stone walls, the entropy.
Sleep, star princess, sleep with me,
constellation made from a plea,
hand in hand, we sink together,
as the satchel releases the worldly tether.
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