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Voyager

By Todd Hearon Todd Hearon

We've packed our bags, we're set to fly

no one knows where, the maps won't do.

We're crossing the ocean's nihilistic blue

with an unborn infant's opal eye.

It has the clarity of earth and sky

seen from a spacecraft, once removed,

as through an amniotic lens, that groove-

lessness of space, the last star by.

We have set out to live and die

into the interstices of a new

nowhere to be or be returning to

(a little like an infant's airborne cry).

We've set our sights on nothing left to lose

and made of loss itself a lullaby.

Source: Poetry (June 2008).

Biography

Poet, playwright, and essayist Todd Hearon grew up in North Carolina. He received an MA in Irish studies from Boston College and a PhD in editorial studies from Boston University. Hearon’s lyric, sometimes formal poems are rich with allusion and historical reference even as they engage contemporary culture. In a 2007 interview for the Exeter Bulletin, Hearon noted, “I have been faced with the new artistic problem (new for me, . . .

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