Through his telescope the professor searches, his withered hands clasped as in prayer.
When young, his Lover was a girl from Neptune,
so now he blushes at the nudity of celestial bodies,
and wonders after the cores of apples and Earth.
The gray hair of the back of his neck rises whenever his azure eyes turn to the horizon.
In dimly lit parlor conversations, the distinguished ladies will agree he’s gone mad –
always was a bit of a strange lad.
Entire nights he wastes looking at nothing new with his great lens pointed straight upward at the wedding band of the Milky Way.
But when he went – for he did go –
down he lay in the company of meteors and supernovas.
Those gentle lights, burning just as a candle burns.
Flickering slowly out beneath his gaze,
burning just as a candle burns, billions of years away.
Lily Grodzins is a sophomore in high school who has been writing poetry since she was literate and dictating it even before that. This is her first professional publication.
