LOOK UP AND LOOK OUT!

by Ron Shapiro

NASA estimates there are more than 100 million pieces of space junk larger than 1 millimeter in diameter in LEO. Approximately 500,000 of those objects are between 1 and 10 centimeters, and more than 25,000 of them are greater than 10 centimeters wide. —Freethink, November 29, 2025

 

On the darkest night of the year

when stars glow like brilliant diamonds

reminding us that we are indeed star dust

that has taken human form on this planet,

we should be grateful for the moonlight

under which tides flow, nocturnal animals

emerge from safe shelters and lovers kiss.

 

Look up once more then slowly realize that

what you thought were stars are actually 

more than 100 million pieces of rockets

and satellites, tools discarded on spacewalks,

junk floating in space. 

 

Here, on this planet, huge landfills stacked high

like mountains with 

    computers, 

    electronics,

    batteries, 

    styrofoam, 

    ink cartridges, 

    glass bottles,

    diapers,

    enough paper to fill several decimated forests

    and, of course, the toxic poisons released

    from human garbage.

 

The Earth is not large enough to handle this waste. 

 

In a world that can seem like a warehouse of commodities,

where capitalism begs for your dollars, once again 

human exceptionalism does not seem to care. 

 

Trash the planet or trash space, 

it’s all the same to those in power. 

 

And once all that space junk begins to collide,

sending more satellites into orbit will become

too risky. Without such devices to enhance 

communication, predict weather patterns,

bring about scientific breakthroughs.

 

Even the possibility of intergalactic travel,

the dreams of science fiction writers and

futurists, writers and artists, will fall into

darkness while humans, who once looked

up to the stars for hope and creative

inspiration, protect themselves from

any space junk falling from the sky.

Ron Shapiro, an award-winning teacher, has published over 20 poems in publications including Nova Bards 24 & 25, Virginia Writers Project, The New Verse News, Poetry X Hunger, Minute Musings, Backchannels, Gezer Kibbutz Gallery, All Your Poems, Paper Cranes Literary Magazine, Zest of the Lemon and twochapbooks: Sacred Spaces, Wonderings and Understory, a collection of nature poetry.

TURNING POINT

Jan Chronister is a retired educator who splits her year between the extremes of northern Wisconsin (by Lake Superior) and southern Georgia. She has authored three full-length poetry collections and twelve chapbooks. Jan edits and publishes the work of fellow poets under the imprint of Poetry Harbor.

SOMETIMES IT'S HARD TO LOVE THE WORLD

by Donna Hilbert

Sometimes it’s hard to love the world 

but not the earth

not hard to love the earth

suffering through no fault

of its own

 

Sometimes it’s hard to love the world 

of humans 

who wrack the earth

as if it were their own

 

It’s not hard to love the children

of the world, but it’s hard to save them

who suffer from the failures

whose making’s not their own

 

It’s hard to love the world that doesn’t love 

its children enough to save them 

even when their heads are bowed and praying 

in their church, their school, their home.

Donna Hilbert’s latest book is Enormous Blue Umbrella from Moon Tide Press, following Threnody, Moon Tide, 2022. A second edition of Gravity: New & Selected Poems is available from Moon Tide. Work has appeared in numerous journals and broadcasts including Cultural Daily, Gyroscope, Rattle, Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART, Vox Populi, The Writer’s Almanac, Lyric Life, and anthologies including The Poetry of Presence volumes I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, Boomer Girls, The Widows’ Handbook, I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing. She writes and leads workshops in Long Beach, California.

GAZA'S CHILDREN

by Rakibul Hasan Khan

 

Gaza’s children are as childish as 
the children of anywhere else—
they’re full of joy,
singing, dancing, jumping,
and playing with extraordinary toys.
 
They’ve plenty to eat and drink,
and beautiful dresses to wear.
They live in luxurious houses
and are always loved and cared.
 
These cheerful children of Gaza
have no memories of Earth,
and no one is a bit sad,
even the cutest ones
who’d just left the warmth of wombs.
 
The happy children of Gaza 
have grown in number 
in such a short time,
and their number is increasing still.
 
Should Heaven—
keep a separate gate for Gaza’s children? 

 
Rakibul Hasan Khan is a Bangladeshi academic, poet, and writer based in New Zealand. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Otago, where he remains affiliated. His scholarly and creative works have been published in internationally recognized platforms.

THE FIRST HUNDRED DAYS

by Elizabeth Kerlikowske

If you can see the moon from your window
even through the wall of branches
then it is calling you to worship.
Hard to stay in bed,
impossible to stay in the house.  
If you can see the moon from the front porch,
you can see raccoons and the seven doe
in blue shadows. The owl wonders
what you are doing here.  Thick
wandering roots reach from the trees, 
dusted with a skin of snow, like veins 
on the backs of your hands going 
where they must go. 
If you can see the moon from Earth,
the cataclysm is still in the future.
Your breath is a cloud without shape.

Elizabeth Kerlikowske’s latest chapbook is Falling Women, with painter Mary Hatch.

MELTING OF ARCTIC SEA ICE

by Ron Shapiro

    a

A polar bear stands on floating sea ice in the Arctic. The bears rely on sea ice to move throughout their hunting grounds. (Image credit: SeppFriedhuber via Getty Images via Live Science.)

'Ominous milestone for the planet': Arctic Ocean's 1st ice-free day could be just 3 years away, alarming study finds —Live Science, December 4, 2024

Another warning,

Red flags up in the scientific

Community, sea ice melting

Faster than an ice cube on

An Arizona day. Polar bears

Shifting their weight on legs

The size of tree trunks while

Balancing on the moving chunks

Of frozen water over a million

Years old. With each piece

Of ice shrinking over time,

How will the polar bear find

Food if he can’t travel far

From his glacier home?

 

Meanwhile, land torn up,

Only a commodity in a world

Based on capitalism. Imbalance

Between humanity and the earth

Causes the dis/ease of fear, anxiety

And consumerism. What comes

From the ground is a commodity,

Something to sell, to buy, to use up.

 

The air warms the melting masses

But so far away from here, how can

Anyone care about this? No plans

For the future. Carpe Diem without

The seizing. Brain rot eats away at

Sanity and intention. Useless images

And misinformation to distract, to

Entertain, to confuse. Abstract words

Populate the language resulting in

Generalization, stereotypes, prejudice,

Bias, and ignorance. Not enough time

To think. Only to react. Tik Tok goes

The Earth’s clock. The air polluted,

The breath compromised, the ice melting,

Polar bears weeping in a cold puddle

Of water swishing at their feet.

Ron Shapiro, an award-winning teacher, currently mentors college essay writing as well as teaches Memoir Writing through George Mason University. He has published writings in Nova Bards 23 & 24, Gatherings, Poets of the Promise, Poetry X Hunger, Minute Musings, Backchannels, Gezer Kibbutz Gallery, All Your Poems, Paper Cranes Literary Magazine and two chapbooks: Sacred Spaces and Wonderings. He lives with his wife and Shanti the Cat in Reston, Virginia.

POST MORTEM: THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

The history of a planet in sixteen lines

by Greg McClelland

Source: Mail Online

It all began when a molten mass,

boiling within,

battered from without,

barreled through a gaping void.

 

Peaks of solidity surfaced;

tectonic hands and burning digits

designed antediluvian bone:

basalt, sandstone, granite, schist.

 

Through five hundred million years,

from Ordovician to Cretaceous,

our mother birthed and killed five litters

of living tissue.

 

Then she birthed a sixth,

which brewed its own poisons—

digital, solid, nuclear, microscopic—

leading to the first synthetic holocaust.

Greg McClelland is a retired government ethics attorney. He has published poetry in Ancient Paths, The Road Not Taken, All Around the Mulberry Bush, and his college alma mater newsletter. Besides writing poetry, he spends his retirement working in political activism, helping to ensure that Trump will never see the inside of the White House again.

BEQUEATHED

 a golden shovel by Bonnie Proudfoot

No meaning but what we find here.

No purpose but what we make.

 

That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:

Turn me into song; sing me awake.

                               —Gregory Orr

 

 

Say you are at the supermarket, no

say you are at the farmer's market, meaning

you don't go in for plastic wrapped food, but

you bring your stringy hemp bag. How nice, but what

did you think, that one tomato at a time we

can stop climate change, find

a way to keep butterflies and songbirds here?

 

Say you'll install solar panels on your roof, no

say you've already installed them, your purpose

feels urgent, you are off the power grid, but

the sun feels stronger every day, what

you never expected was tornados, floods, we

can barely hold on to any progress we make. 

 

Today each weather warning lasts longer, that

way the window of safety shrinks, and

we huddle closer, protect ourselves, our beloved,

while lightning sparks, we wait for all to clear

though we need more time to prepare, instructions

 

to face this new future. The earth will turn

against us, beyond the ladders of light leaning into

the clouds, beyond the hymns and songs

to creation, show me a new song to sing,

not king coal, not drill baby oil, give me

more songbirds to hallelujah my grandchildren awake.

Bonnie Proudfoot is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and reviewer whose work has appeared in online journals and anthologies. Her novel Goshen Road  (OU / Swallow Press) was longlisted for the PEN/ Hemingway and received the WCONA Book of the Year Award. Her recent book of poems Household Gods can be found on Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

NEANDERTHALS IN THE TILE

by Sally Zakariya

This floor tile imported from Turkey and installed during a home renovation contains what is believed to be a cross section of an ancient human jawbone. (Courtesy of Reddit user Kidipadeli75 via The Washington Post)

Check the counters and floors

check all the travertine tiles

Look for signs of the old ones

reaching up through time

   slivers of bone

      shards of teeth

Imagine the beginning: a natural

hot spring somewhere in Turkey

Layer after layer of plants and animals

trapped in the mud and fossilized

Mammoths, rhinos, giraffes,

deer, reptiles—even humans—

embedded in the travertine

Look down and count the years—

a million or more

Each step we take on earth, we walk

on the past

Sally Zakariya’s poetry has appeared in some 100 publications and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her publications include All Alive Together, Something Like a Life, Muslim Wife, The Unknowable Mystery of Other People, Personal Astronomy, and When You Escape. She edited and designed a poetry anthology Joys of the Table and blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.

THE PERFECT HOME

by Indran Amirthanayagam

while Lahaina, Maui burns August, 2023

May I imagine the scene? Do you

agree? Coffee in the studio, light

streaming in, brushes and easel,

a multi-hued cat? But flames

are rising at five hundred yards.

Oh to leap beyond particulate

matter, to dream, go native 

again, python wrapped  round 

banyan branch, peeping through 

the window while monkey hops 

over the ledge and books, 

to the sugar bowl, scatters 

the grains, attracting flies, 

mosquitoes, the ubiquitous 

roach. Paradise does not look 

sweet. Fireball blows up history, 

belief, certainty, and cars,

drivers burned at the wheel, 

while thousands of miles

away as all birds fly,

by pure chance, living

on the mainland, in another 

corner of  the great expanse

of the once blue ball,

I try in vain to catch 

and douse embers flying 

this month’s perfect storm.

Indran Amirthanayagam is the translator of Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (BroadstoneBooks) is the newest collection of Indran's own poems. Recently published is Blue Window (Ventana Azul), translated by Jennifer Rathbun.(Dialogos Books). In 2020, Indran produced a “world" record by publishing three new poetry books written in three languages: The Migrant States (Hanging Loose Press, New York), Sur l'île nostalgique (L’Harmattan, Paris) and Lírica a tiempo (Mesa Redonda, Lima). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly and helps curate Ablucionistas. He won the Paterson Prize and received fellowships from The Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, US/Mexico Fund For Culture, and the MacDowell Colony. He hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.

POET LAUREATE ADA LIMON CREATES A POEM TO BE ENGRAVED ON A SPACESHIP

Others invited to include our own names on a chip

by Alice Campbell Romano

https://europa.nasa.gov/message-in-a-bottle/sign-on/

Years ago I bought you a star.
The framed certificate turns up 
now and then
when I sift a desk, weed a bookshelf.
An undistinguished star 
somewhere 
with your name.
You would better have appreciated
my renaming Mars for you, 
red combatant. 

Earth registers stars 
from Earth’s point of view,
assigns coordinates,
sells naming rights.
Maybe only Earth has this compulsion
to brand the infinite.

Our ambition sends craft 
to search out life
on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
We shall leave Earth’s mark— 
in—be astonished—

a poem 
about Earth. Poets ache.

I am tempted without reason
to piggyback, to add me, 
on a microchip
to Europa. 

You didn’t care when I bought you
a star. I will escape for a billion miles,
to the edge of the infinite, in my 
name alone. 

Alice Campbell Romano lived a dozen years in Italy where she adapted Italian movie scripts into English, married a dashing Italian movie-maker, made children, and moved with the family to the U.S., where they built, she wrote, and the children grew. Her poems have appeared in—among other venues—Prometheus Dreaming, Persimmon Tree, Pink Panther Magazine, Orchards Poetry, New Croton Review; Beyond Words, Writing in a Woman's Voice, Quartet Journal, Instant Noodles Devil's Press, Moon Shadow Sanctuary Press. In January, she was awarded HONORABLE MENTION in The Comstock Review's 2022 Chapbook contest, "...not an award that we give every year, but an honor set aside for a few manuscripts." Alice swooned.