Lone Star by Sebastián H. Páramo

In the end, Houston will launch us into outer space
once more.  We’ll peer at what they call the little blue engine —

They’ll call it EARTH or a FAILURE in the distant future.
They’ll tell us the story of first man, first woman,

first man on the MOON first person
……………to shape another person

out of clay. God. They’ll talk about the Motherships
& Fatherships—by then, we’ll have escaped the milky way.

They’ll tell us about the little things that once cradled
the bigger things, our first sun.

They will not let us dream.

They will not tell us what it means
& we won’t know if this is a blessing or a curse.

Eventually, another ending will come.
We won’t know walls because we’re so far away.

Our children, many generations from now, will ask:

Why did we leave EARTH?
What was the MOON like?
We left MARS too. O, our feral homeworlds.

Nobody can answer our questions because they left us
outside history. In a dream, I’ll mis-remember 

……………physical laws &

…………………………say: gravity is like falling in love.

We don’t remember the ground.
We float like cosmic dust & forget everything.

I’m alone—on the craft now—the faded LONE STAR™.
I’m riding the last remnant of Tejas. It’s the end of an experiment

& distant stars won’t remember my name. 

Sebastián H. Páramo is the author of the forthcoming collection Portrait of Us Burning (Northwestern University Press/Curbstone Books, 2023). His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, The Arkansas International, Prairie Schooner, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. His work has received fellowships and support from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at UT-Austin, and CantoMundo. He is the founding editor of The Boiler, Poetry Editor for Deep Vellum, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Austin College in Sherman, Texas.

3 April 2023