THIRTY-ONE YEARS AGO, on February 26, 1979, a total eclipse of the Sun was visible across the State of Washington and points eastward.  I remember it vividly because I experienced it with a young lady who since then, as my wife, has shared with me countless wonder-filled experiences, under the wide sky.

As time went by, this “sharing” of the sky began to be not just for each other but for an ever-widening audience.  We began to teach children’s classes, give lectures, conduct star parties—and I noticed something interesting: the more of this sky appreciation I shared, the more I felt I owned.

This sense of “ownership” of the wonders I was sharing became clearer to me as I completed my book of poems and essays, First Star I See Tonight, and began to share my insights with an even-larger audience.  Whatever I had truly learned, and appreciated through experience, I found that I had made “my own” (even though, unlike material objects, my owning these things didn’t prevent others from owning them as well).

In First Star I See Tonight, I explore and celebrate seven kinds of wonder, structured into seven chapters: Twilight Zone, Moonglow, Deep Sky, Orion and Friends, Reaching Out, The Home Planet, and Good-Night.  Poetry and prose essays are intermingled in different ways—sometimes aimed at teaching, sometimes simply telling a personal experience—and always based on the assumption that the reader is a total newcomer to astronomy.

An example or two from the book may show how poetry can enhance explanation, and say things that can’t easily be described in prose, yet are meaningful.  On a page where I describe the Doppler shift in sound and light, these haiku carry the reader’s imagination a little beyond sheer explanation:

Oncoming cars whisper,
Their tones dropping lower still
As they pass me by.

A passing car’s hum
Lowers a pitch, and hangs on…
Receding red star.

And sometimes poetry can stimulate thought by analogy—comparing something physically seen with a thought, setting up a resonance that’s hard to put into ordinary words:

January stars
Each shines briefly through its hole
In the flecked cloud-deck.

January thoughts:
Some bright new ones shine through holes
In last year’s habits.

AN INVITATION
Combining “astropoetry” with astro-observing keeps us more alert to descrambling the wonder around us—and allows us to get acquainted with our cosmos in an affectionate and deeply personal way.  We invite readers of this blog to study the examples archived here, then distill their own sky experiences into poetry and send them in.  We look for a lively dialogue.  Here are two or three writing tips:  In writing poems about the night sky, short is usually best, so your focus doesn’t get lost in words.  Try watching for the slightest small things—like a shift of night-wind, an iridescent cloud moving across the Moon, or an unexpected view of the star Canopus in the far south.  Or try crystallizing the big picture, as Romanian astropoet Valentin Grigore so beautifully does here:

DIVINE GIFT
If you have a starry sky in your soul,
Give a starry sky all around you.