Poetry and science 6 – At Point Nemo

January 13, 2022 by Karen Dennison 2 Comments

At Point Nemo

At the height of youth, I circled earth.
It spun at my feet, a distant beauty;
admirers attracted into graveyard orbits.

For me the sun was another star
and though I learnt its physics,
I worshipped it as Ra, studied its secrets.

I was unbreakable and made of light
and time was for other people. I witnessed
the fall of peace – Mir breaking up

on re-entry with smoking hands and fireball-
fingertips, crashing into the South Pacific.
My own descent into waves was sudden,

knocked off course by junk and debris.
For decades I lay on the seabed
with other wrecks and remnants of life.

Diving down through miles of water,
you swam into the sunken city of my heart,
emptied my drowned mouth. I listened

to your stories of the surface, began to believe
in rebirth, in escaping gravity’s grip on my bones;
felt like I was back in high orbit. But you left

how you arrived ― a lone explorer on a mission,
fearless. And every night is terminal velocity,
nothing but the cemetery to break my fall.

Karen Dennison

“Point Nemo” (oceanic pole of inaccessibility) is the area of ocean
furthest from land and is the location of the so-called Spacecraft
Cemetery where retired spacecraft are sent

From Of Hearts, published by Broken Sleep Books. First published in Riggwelter.

Featured image ©strelkamag.com – “cemetery of spaceships” found in point Nemo