On the Day You Launch - by Damen O’Brien
ISLAND | ISSUE 156WINNER, GWEN HARWOOD POETRY PRIZE 2018
The future of the earth is a series of goodbyes, so you
practise them in as many languages as you can. Ciao, sayonara.
How do you know what you should forgive, what you should regret,
what you will miss? Auf wiedersehen, adieu, to you and you and you.
This and this, and this, things you’ve learnt to hold,
tied to you with gentle strings, the umbilicus of memory.
Give it time, the attenuations of distance, the
ruthless shear of moments, accomplish any leave-taking.
What must the last days of the baiji dolphin have been like?
You’ve never heard of it, but now you find it’s gone forever.
Pale and blind, lonely tag-end spirits of the Yangtze river, and a dam
flushed over them long before you were born, or could regret them.
Waiting in your hotel for take-off clearance, old documentaries blinking
at you in your room and the disoriented clicks of dolphins in your sleep.
Say goodbye to them and dress, the world has moved on, the rivers empty
and you are leaving. Life was always adept at forgetting the dead.
The future of the earth is a one-way journey, a series of endings,
a solitary leap into space, loose cord unravelling behind you.
Anything you ever cared about must be forsaken one day, if only because
it cannot be held onto. You close your fingers, but it is gone.
You should begin now: cherish those things you must let go.
Cape Canaveral gives you a blue sky for your leaving. Say goodbye.
The rockets sweat in plumes of condensation and the gantries
sway and wave. Start with these: things are easiest to deny.
Long after the river had been given over to algal blooms, fishermen would
see those dolphins roll and dive. They could not abandon hope,
they could not abandon themselves, their childhood stories of solitary fins
slipping through water. To leave yourself is hardest, everything else can be survived.
Now the world’s poor tug at the barbed wires of the launch site and wish to
join you. What wouldn’t you part from here? Rising seas and stubble crops.
Today you can leap into the uncertain ocean of space and are privileged
to leave that old hegemony of earth, the uncomfortable past.
How do we bear it? How do we let each second stream away
behind us, like the spent ejecta of a rocket pushed into the void?
Because we must. Because we were made for leave-taking and
for each severance, perhaps we are given something new, some brief gift.
I am saying goodbye too, did you know that? As you rehearse
detachment, I watch the sky for contrails spearing into blue haze.
I wonder at the ease of our partition: a lucky ballot and now seven languages
say goodbye to things worth forgetting. The last thing anyone forgives is the past.
Space is all departures and inertia: set a thing in motion and it moves
forever. This leaving pushes us away from each other and gravity does not hold.
Things fail. The night of the universe is a long outward breath
which does not repeat. You know that most of the universe is empty
so you have been saying goodbye, scrubbing out all that you can bear to leave.
Each heartbeat is an ending, not a beginning. You do not send me a message.
The other passengers tell you the trick is not to look back at the earth fading.
Look forward, your spaceship dolphins outwards through the dark. ▼
This poem appeared in Island 156 in 2019. Order a print issue here.
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