NASA/SpaceX Crew Dragon, August 2020
Through a trick of old tongues called
suppletion, translate can mean carried across
not language but space—say, the few feet
from the astronauts’ scorched capsule to waiting
stretchers, on this ship that seems too small
to hold the ballooning relief of their recovery,
their reclamation for the world. Just outside
their window, men test the air for toxins
and megaphones warn away the hideous parade
of flag-waving boats lurking off Florida’s coast.
As I gaze at the stubborn hatch,
wondering if weight feels like a gift
after months without, the word strikes me
with delight, so unexpected, so apt:
How could they, these humans separated
from moons and comets by only glass
and miles, who for a time lived free
from seasons and nations, who, released
from the probable into the possible,
still elected to return—
how could they, these star sailors, ever make
themselves comprehensible to us again?
–
Carolyn Oliver is the author of Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022), winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Prize. Her poems appear in The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Southern Indiana Review, Plume, and elsewhere. Carolyn lives in Massachusetts, where she is editor of The Worcester Review.