Kyrie for a Pale Blue Dot

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Viewed from space, she’s a kaleidoscopic 

marble perched between sunlight 

and abyss. Beneath her skin,

aquamarine streams feed jade canopies, 

throngs weave 

down city streets, bodies pulsate 

to the latest beats, glasses 

clink and shish-kebabs sizzle.

Pea flowers unfurl in evening dew. 

Wheat crops wail in cracked earth as glacier-

fed rivers turn to sandpaper. The aurora ripples 

across the night sky as bony polar bears 

forage in dumpsters, walking fossils 

haloed in chartreuse spirals. Is this 

what Beethoven envisioned 

composing his Kyrie? A prayer 

in D major for this living mosaic whose 

peach blossoms are beckoned to fruit 

by the thrum of bees’ wings, 

whose oak leaves’ last waltzes stud 

the breeze with citrines and rubies, 

and whose forests exhale 

the root of our breath.

                                                                               Finalist for the 2024 Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize,       

                                                                                                   First Published by The Comstock Review