Lesley CLINTON

Lesley Clinton is a writer, editor, and high school English teacher. Her chapbook of poems, Calling the Garden from the Grave (Finishing Line Press), placed 2nd among books of creative verse in the National Federation of Press Women 2021 Communications Contest. In 2019 Clinton received the Lucille Johnson Clarke Memorial award from Houston Poetry Fest. Her poetry and book reviews have appeared in publications such as America, THINK, Mezzo Cammin, The Windhover, Presence Journal, Ekstasis Magazine, Reformed Journal, Christianity & Literature, and Texas Poetry Calendar. In addition to teaching and writing, Clinton serves as a board member of Catholic Literary Arts and is editor in chief of The Chronicle of Strake Jesuit College Preparatory. She has an MA in Teaching from Grand Canyon University and is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at University of St. Thomas. Visit her at lesleyclinton.com. Connect on Twitter (@lclinton_tx), Instagram (lesleyclintontx), and Facebook (@LesleyClintonWriter).

Cassiopeia A, circa 1690

The light from the supernova has just reached Earth.

Ten-thousand years ago, the neon rush

            of hydrogen expanded, lavender

and shock-white, formed in spectral web and dust. 

            It swept up space debris in widening clouds

that now and many generations hence

will radiate a hundred-thousand times

our Sun’s ignoble energy. Asleep,

snug in the glow, there floats an infant star.

As ruddy arrogance is sometimes stripped

away by rival arrogance, so this

red giant tore away the other's skin—

an envelope of hydrogen, we’ll learn

some centuries from now. This violence

bore all the gravity of insult fed

and pressurized. The fighter’s stance of these 

two stars led to a grand finale loosed

in shockwave with a flash of insight, late-

learned hamartia on a solar scale.

Who sees the smudge of light for what it is?

One amateur, stargazing fool. The odds 

of witnessing a reckoning like this

are miniscule. The learned astronomers

were dozing while this putterer, with tired

and star-strained eye, chanced on the gruesome fall,

the supernova of the fiery queen

whose might had once seemed unassailable.

How rarely we discern what’s happening

the moment of the star’s collapse. We miss

the trident strike that hurls the proud queen deep

into the sky, enthroned but bound to wheel 

around the North Celestial Pole and cling

tight, hanging upside down, through half the year.

Fate will judiciously seize fire from one

and dole it out to others, leaving naught

of the progenitor except that dense 

core known as shame, but, too, new life, as here: 

the infant neutron star tucked warmly in

            its mist of carbon, lost in guiltless dreams.

Read Lesley’s work and more in Solum Journal Spring 2022.