vanishing at dawn,

we are mist, we are rain

we are gone.

Fiona Benson

‘Riches I hold in light esteem’

Riches I hold in light esteem

And Love I laugh to scorn

And lust of Fame was but a dream

That vanished with the morn –

And if I pray – the only prayer

That moves my lips for me

Is – ‘Leave the heart that now I bear

‘And give me liberty.’

Yes, as my swift days near their goal

’Tis all that I implore –

Through life and death, a chainless soul

With courage to endure!

Emily Brontë

I want to stand naked in the school hall

on the podium, mid assembly,

so my presence will be so overbearing no one can look away.

I want their eyes to burn into my skin, examine

its ripples and folds and the scar that digs it up

like a trench in Ypres.

I’d watch a few hundred jaws slowly unhinge,

drop down into a mass of O’s, all directed

at my body, lopsided like the projector, its fluorescent beams

bouncing on my raw flesh, so each goosebump

would have its own time in the spotlight.

I want to raise my arms, outstretch my fingertips,

so everyone can see my hairy armpits and wonky tits,

my nipples erect with the cold of a hundred stark looks,

so they’d know, so they’d see, I’m not perfect

and in no way do I want to be. Then,

when I’ve got their attention, I want to read them a poem

through the head teacher’s microphone, full blast

so that each naked syllable in each naked word,

spat from my naked throat, near bursts their eardrums.

Before they stand, frozen and agape, and file out.

Lauren Hollingsworth-Smith

‘Chasing weightlessness’ – The Final Frontier

From children gazing out of the bedroom window long after they should have been asleep, to poets imagining their ascent into distant galaxies, we have always dreamed of wandering among the stars and holidaying on far-flung planets. Here are incantations to take us there.

For most of us, poetry will be our best shot at space travel. Not so for Sally Ride, the first American woman in space and the first known LGBTQ astronaut. In her passionate poem, Laura Fairgrieve imagines her holding a class spellbound, filling them with the fire to ‘run fast enough to crack your scabs’. She tells them (and us):

I did not wait for outerspace to extend its arm to me,

I thrust my face skyward.

I Had a Boat

I had a boat, and the boat had wings;

And I did dream that we went a flying

Over the heads of queens and kings,

Over the souls dead and dying,

Up among the stars and the great white rings,

And where the Moon on her back is lying.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

from Darkness Music

The days grow and the stars cross over

And my wild bed turns slowly among the stars.

Muriel Rukeyser