Signs of Life I know we have just landed a craft on Mars, a planet 140 million miles away, again. budget 2.9 billion dollars. I know the Perseverance Rover currently monitors the atmosphere so we might predict Martian weather, useful, maybe, in some imagined future. I know how it feels to lift a boy-child up into my arms, resting his head on my shoulder, my whole body blooming from the scent of his scalp. I know how it feels to have the hand of a man on my throat chair tipping against a wall. even now, we do not know how we become a hard hand or a pressing knee, have yet to travel a country mile to document these formations. how the soft, suckling mouth of a baby grows to turn and twist, fueled by a pit of sorrow, how we can become a foreign land to our people. I want to travel, here; see if our human curiosity our humble perseverance can reveal how to make this world more habitable. I know that a murmur soft and low, a tender hand, is what we need to sustain signs of life, on earth.
—Submitted on 03/11/2021
Rachael Philipps-Shapiro is a writer and journalist. Currently a student in the MFA program in poetry at Sarah Lawrence, she was a poet in residence at Bethany Arts Center and received an AWP Writer to Writer mentorship. Here journalism spans titles from The New York Times to Edible Westchester to Time Out London and Elle.
SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site.
Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
