Poem for 2/2/23 - A Poet Witnesses a Bold Mission by James Dickey

 

A Poet Witnesses a Bold Mission

by James Dickey (February 2, 1923 - January 19, 1997)

(Dickey was commissioned by Life Magazine to write a poem about the launch of the Apollo 7 mission in 1968. It was published Nov. 1, 1968 in Life Magazine; click here to see page in Google Books. I found a reference to this poem in an article about Dickey’s centennial in The Atlantic by Christopher Buckley: “America’s Byron.” See more about this poem and Dickey's subsequent poem about the Apollo 8 mission here.)

Someone brought in an elk head.

It has become a kind of custom for the astronauts to give the commander of the next flight “something to take with him.”

Two nights before the flight, the elk head sat in a chair, the glass eyes unfathomable, and the men moved in the room and talked, and if you were near enough to the elk, you could see the astronauts in tiny replicas of themselves, in the animal eye.

One was saying his greatest ambition was to learn to play the guitar. Another was showing a poem he had written. It was good; he was proud of it. Another had just come in from hunting doves. His name was Schirra and the elk head was for him.

The great branching antlers were part of the earth--of the earth that is natural and wild and lovable, nothing at all like the awesome rocket these brave, competent men would ride.

The elk was part of what would be left behind when Schira and the others carried the human consciousness outward from where it has always been.

In a sense they are all poets, expanders of consciousness beyond its known limits. Because of them. the death-cold and blazing craters of the moon will think with us, and the waterless oceans of Mars: the glowing fogs of Venus will say what they are.

And those places will change us also. We have not lived them yet, and perhaps have no language adequate to them. But these men will find that, too, as they plunge with their fragile and full humanity, with their wives and children, with their gardens and grocery lists and head colds and ideas for poems and the clowns of their childhood circuses--as they plunge with all of us--up from the flame-trench, up from the Launch Umbilical Tower, up from the elk and the butterfly, up from the meadows and rivers and mountains and the beds of wives into the universal cavern, into the mathematical abyss, to find us--and return, to tell us what we will be.