Norman Minnick's poem "New Horizons"

                                                                                      image courtesy of NASA

"My previous collections of poetry are To Taste the Water (winner of the First Series Award from Mid-List Press), Folly (Wind Publications), and Advice for a Young Poet, (David Robert Books). I am the editor of Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century (White Pine Press) and The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight (Kinchafoonee Creek Press, with a foreword by Yusef Komunyakaa)."

New Horizons

The New Horizons space probe is the size

 of my parents’ four-poster bed 

and is speeding away from the earth 

at 31,000 miles per hour. 

It is almost out of fuel 

and cannot slow down.

It has used the gravitational pull of Jupiter

to slingshot deeper into space. 

Now it has reached Pluto

near the edge of our solar system. 

It will escape our sun’s pull 

and never return. 

Many folks my age and older 

would agree that time goes by faster 

the older we get. Children are growing

at alarming rates, just as our parents foretold. 

I am attending more funerals and taking 

copious trips to the bathroom. 

The toys I played with as a child

are in museums. Last year’s videos 

appear grainy and out of sync. 

When, I wonder, did I pass Jupiter?

(Previously published in Sisyphus)

© 2022 Norman Minnik