‘Holes in the Sky’

Michael C. Roberts is a mostly retired pediatric psychologist seeking creativity through photography. His photograph book, "Imaging the World with Plastic Cameras: Diana and Holga," is available on amazon.com. His photographs have appeared in several literary and scientific journals. His current work of minimalist images depicts the essential beauty in nature and constructed forms often passed without acknowledgement. This series of minimalist images is entitled: The Basics.

Holes in the Sky

We’re going to watch Alan Shepard punch a hole in the sky
we’re going to watch an American astronaut make history
the young nun says while wheeling a black & white TV
into her eighth-grade classroom on a May morning in 1961
and forty students stare and squint at the 12-inch screen
and at 3-2-1 blastoff! the nun makes the sign of the cross
while off to the side under a framed photo of the pope
a ghostly Galileo fails to stifle a sardonic snort
but nobody gets the joke and so they ignore him
and from the back of the room Yuri Gagarin insists
he already punched a hole in the sky a month earlier
but nobody understands Russian so they ignore him too.

Robert Eugene Rubino is a former sports columnist and adult literacy tutor old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis and smart enough to solve The New York Times crossword puzzle on Mondays (other days not so much).