And there you are.

[matsunosuperfan]

A million miles of searching
has brought me here,
past the icy fringe of outer rings,
past moons and stars,
to rest my vessel where your gravity ends.
And there you are,

a smear of blue and improbable green,
wrapped in breath so thin
I marvel that anything inside it dares to dream.
I've studied a thousand worlds
from pock-marked rocks to acid clouds and iron plains
and none of them do this thing you do: radiate.
Not with flame. With something I can’t explain.
I have mapped your poles and latitudes,
I've watched the lights you string along your coasts at night,
heard you argue about how to divide a thing
and then call it your own.
I've heard all the thoughts you launch into the void —
those urgent, beautiful, ridiculous dispatches about love,
and sport,
and the price of bread.

I confess I don't know what to feel.
My people gave up feeling long ago —
we reasoned our way past it —
yet here I hover, instruments gone quiet,
studying a species barely born but builds cathedrals
and makes war
and weeps at music it composed itself.

I should move on.
There are other systems to study.
I have the data I came for.
But I linger in the dark above your clouds,
the way you linger over something beautiful,
afraid that if you look away too long,
it will be gone.

straight fire

please don't change the wonderful "but builds cathedrals" line, which I found a provocative departure from normative syntax. the line has good sound, too.

suggest posisbly "where your gravity pools" or "collects" or similar to address Busker's crit, which I didn't think of myself but now am inclined to co-sign

agree we want to avoid any whiff of cliche as the sentiment is a familiar one, and mostly expressed with a satisfying novelty of diction that should be privileged

I can't shake the instinct that the first stanza is mostly warm-up or needless exposition that could be aggressively trimmed or reconfigured to be less stagey

well, it's a lovely and striking poem <3