prayers in zero gravity

In separation from the familiar, we gain a new appreciation and longing for home.

Photo by Pramod Tiwari on Unsplash

prayers in zero gravity

i

please, give us
a home that won’t slip away
like submarines under dark surfaces,
a home we know and recognize
by how our bare feet feel
against the jagged crust

please, provide us
with safe trajectories
for all those lost in the vacuum,
with safe passage for those
who mutter words which disappear
against light-splattered skies

iii

please, take us
beyond our terrors so they matter less
than dandelion fluff in washed pockets,
beyond the weight of a planet’s pull,
beyond our smiles tight as orbits

please, teach us
how to kneel while airborne,
how to fall like leaves
without forest floors, how to sail
like sunsets without oceans
until we embrace wormholes
as old friends

please, remind us
of things smaller than galaxies,
of acorns, antennae, and tardigrades,
pens and paper in college bound backpacks,
tumbling through darkness

please, keep us
close to our true selves,
close to the billions of unaccounted
planetary bodies, biologies, beings, and energies,
close to the everything of the universe
unpredictable as entropy

vii

please, help us
find a way back to our mothers
as they are seen in the lightyear rearview,
find our cords retethered—
no longer hemorrhaging light,
like a prayer without a god

viii

please, provide us
our strength without conviction,
our faith without doctrine,
our hope to return to that pool of water
we once knew, so deep and cold
it left us gasping

please, return us
to abandoned homes
across the reseeded galaxy,
to abandoned paths, retread,
to overgrown and unlocked doors

please, deliver us
from this exodus,
from the once divine
(now earthbound) goddess
who sleeps under the nightscape
which bends, but does not disappear,
when we close our eyes

by Lesley Hart Gunn

Lesley Hart Gunn is the winner of the Fall 2022 F(r)iction Poetry Contest and has publications in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Uncanny and more. She is originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, but currently teaches college writing at Utah Valley University, where she lives with her family.