As we continue the Sun’s week-long festival, celebrating Rhina Espaillat’s poetry in this year of her ninetieth birthday, we shift gears today from the sonnet to a form that loosens its hold on rhyme and meter, without severing its connection to the traditional constraints of metrical poetry. Where yesterday’s sonnet was a widow’s quiet testimony to absence, today’s poem looks forward, filling in the blank of the future. Its unrhymed stanzas begin with the wide-open energy of the hexameter line, then drop back to pentameter as they conclude. The poem invokes a descendant who, though still nonexistent, hurtles toward being like a comet, to explore the unsettled frontiers of the galaxy. Echoing the poem’s form, the speaker implores this someday-pioneer, whom she clearly loves though she will never see him, not to sever his connection with the earth, but to look back as he looks forward, remembering where he comes from, even as he leaves it behind.  

For My Great-Great Grandson the Space Pioneer 
by Rhina P. Espaillat 

You, What’s-your-name, who down the byways of my blood 
are hurtling toward the future, tell me if you’ve packed 
the thousand flavors of the wind, the river’s voice, 
the tongues of moss and fern singing the earth. 

And where have you left the rain? Careful: don’t lose it, 
nor the moan of the seagull in her blue desert, 
nor those stars warm as caresses 
you will not find again in your nights of steel. 

Watch that you don’t run short of butterflies; 
learn the colors of the hours; 
and here, in this little case of bones 
I’ve left you the perfume of the sea. 

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.