Forty-five years ago in Manhattan,
An elementary school class from New Jersey
On a field trip to the planetarium sat hushed
In a circular room with a dome for a ceiling
As a bizarre device like a space station
In the shape of a dragonfly stripped of wings
Clicked and rotated, throwing points of light
Off the dome in the dark, the sky tonight,
The sky five thousand years ago, the sky
Scrutinized by the Magi, the future sky
Several tens of thousands of years to go,
And a man with a microphone narrated,
And that was the point of the trip, the whole show.
In Salt Lake City on a raw April weekend,
The actual planetarium at the Planetarium
Served as more of a sideshow only a fraction
Of visitors bothered to check out, given all
The tactile, digital displays of astronomy
And what we know of the world beyond
Our world, all the 3D IMAX showings.
The little theater still featured reclining seats
And a dome, and a man with a microphone
Who kicked things off with a warning
About stifling smartphones and their glow,
Then gave a five-minute talk about finding
Orion and a few other easy constellations
To pick out of the sky as it would look above
Salt Lake, beyond the clouds and city lights
That night. But the projector was no longer
A steel and glass monster of gears and bulbs,
Just one lens projecting software from the back
Of the upper row. And even in the planetarium
Most of the show was a movie replete
With computer graphics recapping astrology,
Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler’s Laws,
And some imagined future colony on Mars.
Any representative of evolving cultures,
Whether of words or numbers or both,
Should feel about this perhaps as a person
In a cottage might feel about mice or termites
In the walls, moss on the roof, ants on the floor.
It’s amazing, the tendency for storytelling
To take over the mostly tightly constructed,
Technologically advanced explanations.
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