Ned Balbo

Night Sky of Another Earth

We didn’t even know that it was gone.
In place of stars, a dark gray curtain
hovered overhead,
half haze, half urban

lightstorm from the ground up. Did we look,
or see it on the news, stars bright
in archived images?
We’d lost the sky

to satellites in never-ending orbit,
programmed from below; to waves
of coastal light ascending;
to the glare

that climbs from roads and airfields everywhere,
the wasted afterglow cast off
by cities, radiant towers…
We made that trade.

True night, I’ve heard, survives where we don’t see it,
home to sentinel drones that guard
            the boundaries of a desert.
Galaxy-swept,

cave-black yet filled with stars, it’s like a myth
we memorized in school or half-
remember from some other
Earth where, standing

under immense sky, we gazed in awe
before the panorama, uncertain
of our place, and bothered
to look up.

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Ned Balbo’s newest books are The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots (New Criterion Poetry Prize) and 3 Nights of the Perseids (Richard Wilbur Award), both published in 2019. His previous books are Upcycling Paumanok, Lives of the Sleepers (Ernest Sandeen Prize), Galileo’s Banquet (Towson University Prize) and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems (Poets’ Prize and the Donald Justice Prize). He received a National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship and three Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland Arts Council. Recent poems appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, Ecotone, Literary Matters, Literary Imagination and Gingko Prize 2019 Ecopoetry Anthology. Balbo taught most recently in Iowa State’s MFA program in creative writing and environment and at the West Chester University Poetry Conference. He is married to poet-essayist Jane Satterfield. (More at https://nedbalbo.com.)