Diurnal Motion, Retrograde Motion

Diurnal Motion, Retrograde Motion

What I know, I know from watching.

Where the Sun rises from its grave like a ghost,
there is East.
Where the Sun lays its head like a newborn babe,
there is West.

There is a stoic star that won’t be budged,
not by days or nights coaxing it,
or seasons begging it to change with them,
or years growing wrinkled and wise, saying turn, turn.
there is north and away is south, unmoving.

When the full moon swings highest among the stars like a child’s kite,
I should be sleeping. That is midnight.
And when it sets, that is morning.

The old men of greece were also observers
and they noticed the way planets paused on their eastward journey,
to travel a few months with the westward crowd,
perhaps picking up a lost shoe, or exchanging tales,
and then resuming their path again,
lonely, but without a hint of looking back.

Once, I drove back south to the home of my childhood,
five hours in an empty car, listening to the motor hum
and singing while the moon set, first-quarter.

The house I played in as a child was occupied with others.
The concrete bridges I used to cross had been replaced.
A friend of mine was working three jobs,
and another friend got married.
I was there at the wedding, watching.

But I didn’t belong there anymore.
The whole city had gone to a place I couldn’t follow
and what was lost to me could no longer be found here.
I smiled and spoke with everyone, and then I left,
five hours with the moon flying behind me,
heading north, the Sun setting on my left
and on my right, sitting in silence beside me,
the ghost of where I used to be.

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Every now and again I get to incorporate astronomy into my poetry. This poem started off because I'm writing, or aiming to write, a poem every day this month and today I looked outside and notice that it was a first-quarter moon tonight and how I knew, therefore, that it had risen at noon and that's why it was so high up around 6pm. So I started off the poem with that and just started listing things I knew from observing in astronomy, and then the poem took its own turn that to felt connected and somehow wrapped up everything very nicely at the end, complete with an envelope technique (where something at the beginning also appears at the end.

For those of you who wish to know, diurnal motion means the apparent daily westward motion of celestial objects (caused by the Earth spinning eastward). It's what we see on a day to day basis. That being said, objects in our Solar System also have other motion throughout the year (for instance the planets slowly move eastward night after night, except for when retrograde motion occurs, which is the apparent westward motion of a planet through the sky after during the course of several months).