Susan TelferMy Planet
O this great beloved world and all the creatures in it.
—P. K. Page
I was in space, I watched as planets spun,
brightly tinted and shining, around the sun.
I was trying to catch a rusty planet,
but it pulled too fast—I kept missing it.
Suddenly I saw a lustrous planet,
detailed green and glistening blue, intricate,
rushing toward me. “Oh, the Earth!” I thought,
“My home. That's the planet I should have caught.”
I watched Earth as it spun past and around.
“Hold onto your home planet!”—Was that sound
my voice, as I watched the continents form?
Amen. How could I have been mistaken?
I remember the gym-sized relief map
and I, a child on a skywalk overlap.
I steamed above B.C. as on a strange
iron. My eyes smoothed each mountain range.
Now I saw carrots grow in our garden,
dragonflies skim through our yard. The advent
of the children's faces my womb would birth:
the things I most care about on this earth.
I saw Greenland's icebergs melt, command
snowy winters for my sister in England.
I loved the holy surface of the planet,
my faint life, traced on a western wet
edge of a continent in a band of time,
all the varied molecules and enzymes.
I felt like I was about to be born.
This is what I'd come for, my forlorn world.
