LARRY THACKER

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POETRY

Article: “A Third of the World    
     Cannot See the Milky Way”

I was a teenager before I realized
there were people on earth who could
actually observe the Milky Way
with the naked eye, rather than only
a few hundred stars on a clear night.
I suppose I’d assumed all the images
of distinct star fields filling the night
like clouds were the special work
of telescopes, or long-exposed film.
When I finally learned the phrase
light pollution I was angered. Every
night I’d looked up and guessed
what I saw was the best we could do.
And I was jealous that billions of others,
even trillions of others long dead,
even animals we haven’t dug up,
had observed that starry lit belt of night
every damn time the sun went down.
Now here I was, polluted with the light
of technology through me. You don’t
know what you don’t know, after all.
And though I knew I was so tiny
in this scheme of things, the rest
of what I didn’t know above my head
could have taught me even better
just how meaningless we all are
and that there are better things
to be doing than staring at all the pretty
twinkles of the city lights and the TVs
and the dashboards and the PCs
and the neon tubes and cell phones,
that the best thing to do is find
a dark spot on the earth and go there
and look up, stop for a while,
to make up for what we’ve missed
clearly seeing and unlearn how the words
light and pollution can be fused together
in our lives, and realize we’re small
but never alone in our skyward gaze.

Trans-Mortem History  

Will anyone be around
to dig up our analogue bones,
let alone wonder what stories,
poems, family portraits, selfies,
and cat poses once circulated
the lost electricity of flash-drives,
the lasered grooves of CDs, binary
of internal hard-drives of laptops
or room-fulls of servers, fully
cobwebbed now, mouldy
with roof leaks, what once
preoccupied the neuro-electrical pulses
inhabiting our minds, once only
caring what shade of ochre to swish
in mouths and spit-spray over
our sprawled hands along
carefully chosen cave walls?