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Night Game
Mary Mercier

Each night I study the skylight’s busy parade
of planes and planets, lightning
bugs and auroras.

They are not the only show. Even satellites want
their piece of sky. But best of all is the game—
the night game—held in the southern sky on a winter night.

Outdoing Mars are the stars of Orion
and his ragged team. I watch in awe as he hits
his fuzzy white ball into night’s out-
field. And I am impressed, I who know nothing
of this starry myth—the source of its name, its famous
belted man. He still looks like a batter to me
and a very successful one, batting a thousand
each night. It will take light years before
his home run disappears, extinguished only by time
or perhaps some uncalled-for
expansion.

—
Mary Mercier is a poet inspired by the bite of old glaciers. Her chapbook Small Acts was published by Parallel Press and her poems have appeared in Northern Woodlands, Mezzo Cammin, Stoneboat, and other journals. A finalist for the Birdy Poetry Prize, her collection Five Reports of Fugitive Dust has just been published by Meadowlark Press.

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Have you read these poems:
To the Men I Stopped Dating Too Soon by Anne Rankin
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