Tuesday Poem: New Year’s resolution, by Saradha Koirala

Back on Earth we gauged the pressure, decided
it was not strong enough to turn carbon into
diamond rain but enough to incite change. We
took on new tasks, approached old jobs with
renewed determination. After all, we’d made it
around the sun again: a revolution to spark a
revolution. When we heard all the known matter
in the universe could fit into a grain of sand, we
took it in our stride; strode across sandy shores
anyway, trying not to do the maths. We had
been to Titan – a smog-covered moon – we
knew what we were getting ourselves into. We
laughed too loudly and cried out: If the distance
from the sun to Pluto is a ten cent piece then
the Milky Way is France!

Credit note: “New Year’s resolution” is included in Saradha Koirala’s latest poetry collection Tear Water Tea and is reproduced here by kind permission of the author.

Tim says: I recently finished Tear Water Tea and loved it – it’s among my favourite poetry collections of the past few years. I very much admire the aptness and precision of the word choices Saradha makes in her poems: that was already evident in her first collection, Wit of the Staircase, and in her new collection it’s coupled with a wider and more ambitious range of subject matter. Plus, the book’s design is beautiful!

I previously interviewed Saradha, and used her poem A secret I don’t mind you knowing as the Tuesday Poem on my blog that week.

There are lots of poems I could have requested from Saradha for this blog, but when I saw that she’d written a science fiction poem (well, she might not think of it as a science fiction poem, but I do!) I said “that’s the one for me!”. And, with Saradha’s agreement, here it is.

The Tuesday Poem: Is hungry like the wolf.