Skylab by Rolf Jacobsen

Going outside for a smoke now. It’s a beautiful sky tonight. My favorite time of the day: me, the sky, the quiet, while everybody else is asleep, dreaming.

Skylab
Rolf Jacobsen
Translated by Roger Greenwald

We’ve come so far, thought the astronaut
as he swam around the capsule in his third week
and by accident kicked a god in the eye
–so far
that there’s no difference anymore between up and down,
north and south, heavy and light.
And how, then, can we know righteousness.

So far.
And weightless, in a sealed room
we chase the sunrises at high speed
and sicken with longing for a green stalk
or the heft of something in our hands. Lifting a stone.

One night he saw that the Earth was like an open eye
that looked at him as gravely as the eye of a child
awakened in the middle of the night.