not yet
“I’m doing fine,” I told my friend Michelle,
at the Society of Children’s Book Writers
booth at the Tucson Book Festival,
“Just haven’t found a soul mate,
and it‘s getting kind of late—”
“Not yet,” she said,
“You haven’t found one yet.”
How sweet her words,
like my parents laughing
at The Honeymooners on TV,
in our one-bedroom apartment
on Rockaway Parkway, in Brooklyn,
New York State, USA, Earth, Solar System,
Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo Cluster,
Laniakea (meaning ‘immense heaven’ in Hawaiian)
Supercluster, and the only universe so far known.
Later that day, at the Vatican Observatory booth,
I saw Brother Guy, who I’d heard earlier on a panel
discuss astrobiology and plug his newest book,
Would You Baptize An Extraterrestrial?
I asked if we might speak and confessed
that thirty years before, I’d tried
talking to Father Coyne
who became Director
of the Vatican Observatory,
but he wouldn’t hear me out,
my having no scientific clout,
just a calling of the cosmic kind
that left me seeking a kindred mind.
“With so much progress made in astronomy,”
I said, staring Brother Guy in the eye,
“I hoped I might be able to confess to you
the breakthrough I went through,
and what I was told I should do,
which could be my fantasy,
but might be reality.”
Brother Guy replied, but with crowds
walking by, chatting, laughing, shouting,
I only made out his last few words.
“I’m not ready yet,”
he said, his yet taking flight
through the almost spring light,
as unbaptized aliens winked
invisibly in sight.
The future in your mirror
is closer than it appears.