Flight of Fancy

I imagine a place filled with light.

A place to which I can travel.

Cold burning star surrounding a planet

or a celestial body as bright as a star

I want to go to where I imagine

the stars fill the deep, blackened sky.

The path of the Milky Way crosses the sky

resplendent in wide swaths of light.

Who named all the stars I can only imagine

Who wanted to journey, to visit, to travel

little did she know of the moon and the stars

and nothing of the dwarves and the planets.

If I could fly, I’d head toward a distant planet

one floating deep in the icy cold sky

far from the celestial bodies I know, the stars

unfamiliar objects spreading their light

along the path of whirling spheres that I travel

filling that starry, fantastical place I imagine.

Surely ancient astrologers looked out and imagined

the Earth moving along, passing other planets.

Those early scientists must have yearned to travel,

to ascend to the heavens, to ride across the sky

on waves of energy and wave lengths of light.

Never could they imagine the sun as a star.

When I close my eyes I imagine a billion stars

burning brightly even greater than I can imagine

Filling the sky with streams of white light.

from heavenly bodies and unknown planets

filling the expanse of darkened, deep sky

urging us Earthbound explorers to travel

Wending back through imaginary galaxies I travel

Passing familiar planets and recognizable stars,

sensing which galaxies belong in my sky

the universe I watch and the one I imagine

Mars, Mercury, and Venus, my known planets

Glowing from the reflection of my sun and its light.

In all the intergalactic travel I imagine

of glorious stars and hidden planets

The sky from my porch is the light I adore.

Previously Published in Poets to Come,

A Poetry Anthology on Walt Whitman's Bicentennial