At first glance, we are as startled as deer caught in headlights.
An aerial tableau radiates the fabric of our last exposure.

Witness the silence of this photograph. Crimson wounds dot
a sallow landscape. Black gullies lie where rivers rose, then sank.

Upon a closer study, like astronomers, we have erred again.
One hundred miles above the city, a sham moon snaps images below.

Twenty shots a minute invade this vulnerable earth. Terse lines
of water caress a land still faintly green. With our ears barely

touching the glass, we seem to hear the spring-flux movement
of radio waves expanding, expanding, We're here, we're here.

Long before Mir or Atlantis, native Africans seized cameras
from the grasps of studious anthropologists shouting,

Pictures rape the soul. They recognized the threat
to the rise of our shadow selves, but we, here at home,

document the circumference of this sphere
and label it possibility

                                                      Originally published in Western Ohio Journal