Briefly, this afternoon, a small offering. I was wandering through the wilderness of my iphone notes app while my toddler was draped across me trying to fall asleep for his nap, and happened upon this fully formed poem that I’d totally forgotten about writing. It’s dated April 4th, 2023. I was very pregnant, about to turn thirty. I was thinking about the stars, and my own place within them.
The world is terrifying today and everyday. There is so much suffering that I feel so powerless in the face of (beyond writing my representatives and asking for ceasefire, and bearing witness to real people suffering, which is admittedly too small but not nothing.) Reading this poem, I remembered for a moment the vastness of the universe, the celestial bodies around us, and my own small self within it all. We are each our own, and we are collective too. We are small within something huge, our own little universes, all pale blue dots. And this is my saturn return. What is yours? Your life changing, my life changing, the multitudes of sufferings and joys. This poem feels a little silly and self-centered in the face of the things others in the world are facing, but its a small true dispatch from my life, a little orientation, and that’s an offering even so. I don’t have much to offer to the world beyond little useless poems, so I’ll just keep at it, giving what I have.
Sending love to all who hurt, to all who are orbiting the same strange stars as me in your own way. I hope you are safe. I hope you are somewhere you recognize.
p.s. poems on substack are best to read on a desktop vs. mobile so there is more space for proper line breaks, but you’ll catch the drift either way!
poem about saturn return
A Saturn Return happens approximately every 29.5 years (i.e., the duration of Saturn's orbit around the sun), which means it lands in the same place in the sky it did when you were born roughly around the time you turn 29. Generally, it “returns” for approximately 2.5 to three years... Because Saturn is the planet of responsibilities, time, and wisdom, a Saturn Return is, basically, your astrological coming of age. (via the cut)
the internet tells me it’s time, in a jaunty star-themed calculator. it tells me to expect reality checks, restriction, mortality, and loss. yes, my saturn return is motherhood. I knew it was cosmic, knew it was planetary. I’m pregnant for the second time. time to get flung back around. hear this song as a lullaby, a dirge, or a psalm, selah, shush away slowly from the sleeping child and close the door so gently. what did I want? for it to be easy? for all my seams to stay stitched up, to not come undone when my world hurtled back toward a strange hot center? every thing changed! there is no rest! I am alone! these shouts shoot into a solar system that is mostly small rocks, bigger rocks, then planets. so, this is my saturn return. and, honestly, it’s tidy. here, take care of someone else now. here, be remade by forgetting who you always have been. be only here, in this single dark room, small body heaped in your arms, across your belly where a new baby grows. my soul has been multiplied into three, a new trinity in the space of me. how did we get here? only by giving blood and bones, and nearly every hour for years. here, return to the same stars as your birth, as you give birth to your children who obliterate you so sweetly that it becomes your little universe to be in pieces and alone in the white noise hush. spun back around to just where I started. have I made any progress? I was an infant, now I carry an infant, and what between? saturn is where I know it to be, where it sees me best, says “that one” about me, with its luminous rings making an embrace that is a circle. I have made my way around the primordial tower, showing my mother’s face in mine, to this place where my own soul begs *do not destroy* and *one more day* and very little else with any sort of language. it’s hard to carry the weight, except the gentle lift of the notion that I’m right where I am meant to be, located somehow in my own stars underneath my own sky with my children and my acre of land and my wits about me, underneath a startling galaxy of possibilities. the god who has forgotten me remembers. the arms that carry me set me down safe on my own two feet again. you are doing this.
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I loved this 🥺💛💛